^toow 
 
 A 
 
THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
THE GREEK TRADITION 
 
 FROM THE DEATH OF SOCRATES TO THE COUNCIL 
 
 OF CHALCEDON 
 
 (399 B. C. TO 451 A. D.) 
 
 INTRODUCTION : PLATONISM 
 VOLUME I. THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
THE RELIGION OF 
 PLATO 
 
 BY 
 
 PAUL ELMER MORE 
 
 AUTHOR OF "SHELBURNE ESSAYS" 
 
 PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS 
 
 PRINCETON 
 
 LONDON : HUMPHREY MILFORD 
 
 OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 
 
 1921 
 
Copyright, 1921, by 
 Princeton University Press 
 
 Published, 1921 
 Printed in the United States of America 
 
PREFACE 
 
 In the Preface to my Platonism I said that 
 my purpose in pubhshing that work was to lay 
 the foundation for a series of studies on the or- 
 igins and early environment of Christianity and 
 on various modern revivals of philosophic re- 
 ligion. Four years have passed since those lec- 
 tures were delivered and printed, and the project 
 which then stood rather vaguely before me has 
 taken more definite shape. My plan now is that 
 the series — or better, perhaps, the core of the 
 series — should consist of four volumes. Of these 
 the first is presented herewith; the second will 
 deal with the Hellenistic philosophies, principally 
 Epicureanism, Stoicism, and Neoplatonism; the 
 third will be on Christianity, and the fourth will 
 contain a number of essays on fundamental ques- 
 tions raised in the course of the foregoing studies. 
 
 As I have already observed, and may have to 
 observe again, my intention is not at all to com- 
 pose a history of Greek philosophy or of Chris- 
 tian dogma ; the work in these fields has been done 
 thoroughly and repeatedly. Nor am I concerned 
 with ultimate origins. No doubt, to take the 
 present volume, an exposition of Plato's sources 
 would be interesting and would throw a clarifying 
 
 45G775 
 
vi PREFACE 
 
 light on some of his religious ideas ; but this field 
 also has been well covered, notably by Erwin 
 Rohde. Somewhere one must start, some re- 
 striction one must accept ; and the inclusions and 
 limitations imposed on the task here begun are 
 determined by the fact that it is undertaken with 
 a very definite thesis in view. Just what that 
 thesis is it may be well to state at the outset in the 
 fewest possible words. 
 
 My belief then is that Greek literature, philo- 
 sophic and religious, pagan and Christian, from 
 Plato to St. Chrysostom and beyond that to the 
 Council of Chalcedon in 451 a. d.^ is essentially 
 a unit and follows at the centre a straight line. 
 This body of thought I call the Greek Tradition, 
 since the main force in preserving it intact while 
 assimilating large accretions of foreign matter 
 was the extraordinary genius of the Greek speech. 
 The initial impulse to the movement was given 
 by a peculiar form of dualism developed by Plato 
 from the teaching of his master Socrates. The 
 great Hellenistic philosophies — Epicurean, Stoic, 
 and Neoplatonic — were attempts, each on a dif- 
 ferent line, to reconcile the dualistic inconsistency 
 in the nature of things, as we know them, by 
 forcing our experience into the Procrustean bed 
 of reason. And each of these philosophies, it may 
 be said here, by its rationalistic rejection of the 
 paradox in the nature of things only succeeded at 
 
PREFACE vii 
 
 the last in falling into grosser paradoxes of logic 
 and ethics. Christianity, on the contrary, not- 
 withstanding its importation of a powerful for- 
 eign element into the tradition, and despite the 
 disturbance of its metaphysical theology, was 
 the true heir and developer of Platonism, truer 
 than any of the pagan philosophies. And by 
 the side of the orthodox faith, as set forth in the 
 Creed of Nicea and the Definition of Chalcedon, 
 there ran a succession of heresies which endeav- 
 oured, each again on its own line, to reconcile the 
 paradox of the two natures and one person of 
 Christ by methods curiously resembling the mon- 
 istic rationalism of the heretical philosophies, if 
 I may so call them. 
 
 It is this tradition, Platonic and Christian at 
 the centre, this realization of an immaterial life, 
 once felt by the Greek soul and wrought into the 
 texture of the Greek language, that lies behind 
 all our western philosophy and religion. With- 
 out it, so far as I can see, we should have re- 
 mained barbarians; and, losing it, so far as I 
 can see, we are in peril of sinking back into bar- 
 barism. Unfortunately the direct tradition 
 passed in the East into the keeping of a people 
 who had no strength of heart and mind to main- 
 tain it, and, roughly speaking, with the death of 
 Chrysostom, the virtue had at last gone out of it ; 
 then Greece came to an end. But in the West 
 
viii PREFACE 
 
 the tradition met a different fate. There it was 
 taken up by a people of stronger nerve, who 
 showed in rehgion the same faculty of assimila- 
 tion as they had shown in pure literature, and 
 who passed the inheritance on to the vigorous 
 young races of the North. 
 
 Yet if the Latin genius assimilated much, it 
 also adapted; and the tradition, as it comes to 
 us through this medium, assumed a new ethos 
 at the first, and in the centuries since the separa- 
 tion of East and West it has received accretions 
 which threaten the integrity of its foundation. I 
 do not mean that religion has gained nothing by 
 its transmission through the Latin mind; a cer- 
 tain note of character and worldly wisdom it 
 wanted, and these Rome and her heirs could give. 
 Nor would I belittle the intellectual achievement 
 of the great doctors of the western Church and 
 the western schools in the Middle Ages and since 
 the Renaissance. But withal I am convinced that 
 in certain important matters the Latin, and I may 
 add the Teutonic, mode of thought has perverted 
 the stream of philosophy and religion, and that 
 the need of the modern world becomes daily more 
 urgent to make a return to the purer source of 
 our spiritual life. This does not imply that we 
 should forget all the secular learning of the inter- 
 vening ages, or that we should cease to be our- 
 selves, if that were possible ; but it does recognize 
 
PREFACE ix 
 
 in the Greek Tradition something which we must 
 recover if rehgion is not to disappear and leave 
 our existence dismally impoverished, something 
 without which our wisdom may become vanity 
 and our science a bondage. "We now are turn- 
 ing," says Dr. Foakes Jackson in his History of 
 the Christian Church, "from the great men whose 
 writings made the Christianity of the Middle 
 Ages and of the Reformation, from St. Augus- 
 tine and St. Thomas Aquinas, from Luther and 
 Calvin, to the Greek thinkers, St. Athanasius, 
 St. Gregory of Nyssa, and St. Cyril, to help the 
 religious difficulties of a scientific age." I would 
 broaden Dr. Jackson's statement by regarding 
 this eastward movement as the culmination of a 
 half-conscious tendency of the English Church 
 from the time of the Reformation; and I should 
 like to modify it by including Plato with the 
 masters of eastern theology. 
 
 The volume now offered, as I have said, is the 
 first of four which are designed to constitute a 
 single connected treatise. The preceding volume, 
 Platonism, may be taken as an introduction to 
 the series, and in the main it fulfills that office 
 suitably enough ; but, owing to the fact that when 
 it was written the larger project of the series was 
 not clearly formed, some things are included in it 
 which belong more properly to the body of the 
 work, and some things are omitted which might 
 
X PREFACE 
 
 naturally be expected in an introduction. That 
 must be my apology if any reader is annoyed 
 by what may seem unnecessary repetitions in 
 these two books on Plato. 
 
 The narrowing of time and the chances of life 
 are a warning that I should be well content if 
 these four volumes, which I have called the core 
 of the series, are brought to completion. But 
 still "a dream cometh through the multitude of 
 business," and a man's "heart taketh not rest in 
 the night" — which, the Preacher adds, "is also 
 vanity." Already other subjects, on the fringe of 
 the projected circle, are pressing upon my atten- 
 tion. A volume on the tragedians would offer 
 an opportunity to fill out the background to 
 Plato's religious ideas ; a special study of Clement 
 of Alexandria, with translations of passages from 
 his works duly selected and arranged, would 
 elucidate the relations of Platonism and Chris- 
 tianity; essays on the Cambridge Platonists and 
 the Tractarians of Oxford might furnish an in- 
 teresting illustration of the never fully realized 
 trend of Anglican thought. But these things lie 
 on the lap of the gods ; and now I remember the 
 prayer of Marcus Aurehus: "The work of phi- 
 losophy is simple and modest, let me not be drawn 
 away into vain pomp of words." 
 
 As a control upon the discussion of the various 
 aspects of Plato's religion, it has seemed advisable 
 
PREFACE xl 
 
 that the reader should have actually before him 
 a translation of the passage on which in each case 
 the argument is chiefly based. Thus chapter ii, 
 introducing the topic of philosophy, gives the 
 hypothetical paragraphs of the second book of 
 TJie JReiyuhlic; chapter iv contains the theological 
 excursus that forms the tenth book of the Laws; 
 chapter vii epitomizes the myth of creation from 
 the Timaeus; and chapter x is from the general 
 preamble in the fourth and fifth books of the 
 Laws, dealing with worship and the religious life. 
 If there is a more heart-breaking task than the 
 attempt to convert Plato's Greek into English, I 
 do not know it, and any one who has tried his 
 hand thereat will understand my regret that it 
 was not permissible to print from Jowett or some 
 other of the standard translations. As it is, I 
 have borrowed words and phrases pretty freely 
 from my predecessors. In general my version 
 follows the original closely. The only liberty I 
 have allowed myself is to omit, without indica- 
 tion, the scattered bits of talk that break the con- 
 tinued flow of the argument, or, in a few cases, 
 to incorporate a question or reply into the main 
 discourse. This procedure has involved the oc- 
 casional neglect of a term of address. Omissions 
 of a larger nature are indicated. 
 
 In conclusion a sentence or two regarding the 
 footnotes. Some of these, more indeed than I 
 
xii PREFACE 
 
 like, are controversial. They must be excused 
 by the necessity, as I am bound to see it, of clear- 
 ing Platonism of the false metaphysical interpre- 
 tations that have been clustering about it since 
 the days of the so-called Neoplatonists. As for 
 the rest of the notes their aim, when not mere 
 references, is to keep constantly in view the main 
 thesis of this book as a member of the series, viz. 
 that the religion of Plato is not an isolated phe- 
 nomenon but an integral part of the great Tra- 
 dition. It may be that I should have attained 
 my object better if the quotations in the notes 
 also had been turned into English; but some- 
 thing, I felt, ought to be conceded to those readers 
 who cherish the speech of Plato and Paul and 
 Chrysostom, and for other readers the sight of 
 the unfamiliar letters may serve as a provocative 
 reminder that our spiritual and intellectual in- 
 heritance is still intrinsically Greek. 
 
 P. E. M. 
 Princeton, N. J., 
 
 May 31, 1921. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Preface v 
 
 I. The Components of Religion 1 
 
 ^ II. Translation from Tlie Be public. 
 
 Book ii 22 
 
 ~^III. Philosophy: Justice and the Soul. . 37 
 
 IV. Translation of Laws X 75 
 
 V. Theology: The Being of God 107 
 
 VI. Theology: Providence and Justice . 137 
 
 v/ VII. Translation from the Timaeus. . . . 167 
 
 VIII. Mythology: The Creation 198 
 
 IX. Mythology: The Problem of Evil. 232 
 
 X. Translation from Laws IV and V. 262 
 
 XI. Rehgious Life : Worship 278 
 
 XII. Religious Life: The Ideal World. 309 
 
 Appendix A 340 
 
 Appendix B 345 
 
 Appendix C 350 
 
 1/ 
 
THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 THE COMPONENTS OF RELIGION 
 
 The subject of the present volume is the re- 
 ligion of Plato as part of a great spiritual ad- 
 venture of the ancient world from the death of 
 Socrates to the Council of Chalcedon just eight 
 centuries and a half later. This movement, 
 despite large importations from without, was es- 
 sentially a product of the Hellenic mind; but its 
 record comes to us in two languages, Greek and 
 Latin, whose genius was strikingly different. 
 One of the pecuHarities of the Greek tongue is 
 its richness in distinctions where often it lacks 
 terms to gather these distinctions under a com- 
 mon head. And nowhere is this peculiarity more 
 marked than in the subject we have to consider; 
 for, strange as it may seem, Greek has no ex- 
 pression for the general idea conveyed by the 
 word "religion," which we take from the Latin. 
 The nearest approach to it perhaps is euseheia, or 
 theoseheia; but the meaning of these terms is 
 rather "piety," an aspect of religion, than religion 
 in the more comprehensive sense. No word, or 
 
 1 
 
2 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 combination of words, can be found in the lan- 
 guage of Epicurus, or of Plato and St. Athana- 
 sius, to carry the exact equivalent of "religion" 
 in the tremendous line of the Epicurean poet of 
 Rome: Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum. 
 On the other hand it is equally true that Latin, 
 strong in generalizations but poor in distinctions, 
 had no native resource for discriminating the 
 main components of what is reallj^ a complex 
 phenomenon, and for terms to designate these 
 was obliged to borrow from its sister speech. If 
 "religion" is Latin, "philosophy" and "theology" 
 and "mythology" are Greek. 
 
 Now this linguistic difference corresponds to 
 a deep-seated divergence in ways of thinking. 
 That is not to say that the Latin mind was totally 
 incapable of analysis; Latin did in fact adopt 
 the Greek terminology for the various com- 
 ponents of religion, and so handed them on to us. 
 Nor does it follow that, because the Greek lan- 
 guage possessed no definite term for religion, 
 therefore the Hellenic mind was completely in- 
 sensible to the generalization lying behind diver- 
 sity. Such an inference would be unwarranted, 
 for an idea may be operative although there be 
 no single word available to express it. But it is 
 true that these traits of the Latin and the Greek 
 languages are indicative of an original bias or 
 emphasis in the mind and temper of the two 
 
COMPONENTS OF RELIGION 3 
 
 peoples, and that a language tends to preserve 
 such a bias or emphasis among its inheritors. We 
 can see this in the fact that, even apart from other 
 modifications introduced by the temper of Rome, 
 primitive Christianity as it is presented in the 
 Latin Fathers gives the impression of an unana- 
 lysed experience of the whole soul, whereas in the 
 Greek Fathers it is comparatively easy to keep in 
 view the strands of which that experience is com- 
 posed. Undoubtedly, so far as religion is a mat- 
 ter of character and the will, it happens that 
 power has been transmitted with the Latin unity 
 of conception ; but it is at least a question whether 
 such gain in power has not been at the expense of 
 clear thinking.^ The driving force of religion 
 would seem to be connected with something un- 
 analysable at its heart; its surest defence against 
 critical attack, on the contrary, may be found in 
 a more intellectual comprehension of its struc- 
 ture. And so, in an age of sceptical criticism, if 
 we care to recover our inheritance of faith, it may 
 
 1 An illustration of the danger inherent in this tendency to 
 generalize without regard to distinctions may be found in the 
 authorized version of James i, 27: "Pure religion and undefiled 
 before God and the Father is this, To visit the fatherless and 
 widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from 
 the world." St. James is defining threskeia, "religious worship or 
 usage," which is not coterminous with the Latin religio; and to 
 take his words as a defi.nition of religion in toto, as they are 
 often taken today, leads to a deplorable impoverishment of the 
 spiritual life. 
 
4 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 be advisable to look beyond the Latin sources, 
 on which our western world has mainly depended, 
 to the Hellenistic Fathers of the Church, and be- 
 yond them to the earlier thinkers of Athens, to 
 Plato first of all. By this process we may be able 
 to get a clearer understanding of what is univer- 
 sally valid in religious experience, and to separate 
 the deciduous overgrowth from what is still of 
 vital importance for us in the Greek Tradition. 
 
 In the following chapters I propose to study 
 the religion of Plato first under the three aspects 
 of philosophy and theology and mythology, and 
 then as a composite whole; but as a preliminary 
 it may be well to take a hasty survey of the 
 changing fortune of these terms in the course of 
 their ancient history. 
 
 It is natural that philosophy, as standing for 
 what was most presumptuously Hellenic and 
 pagan, should have had the most diversified 
 career. Among classical writers, from the begin- 
 ning or from a very early period, the word ac- 
 quired a double sense, practical and theoretic. At 
 one time it might denote merely an unreasoned 
 discipline or way of life, as, for example, in the 
 speech composed by Lysias to be spoken by an 
 uneducated cripple before the Senate of Athens : 
 "For this, I think, is the aim and philosophy of 
 all the afflicted, that they may live under their 
 misfortune with as little discomfort as possible."^ 
 
 2 For the Cripple 10. 
 
61lE 
 
 COMPONENTS OF RELIGION 6 
 
 Between this ethical use of the word and its 
 higher, more theoretical sense the interval is 
 bridged over by such a thought as the following 
 from Marcus Aurelius: "What then can help 
 us on our way? One thing, and one alone, phi- 
 losophy; which is to keep the spirit within us 
 (ton endon daimona) inviolate and free from 
 scathe."^ From this it is an easy step to Plato's 
 consummation of wisdom in self-knowledge, and 
 to that "philosophy of the soul" which is a recog- RepubUc 
 nition of its diviner potentiality. 
 
 The mediator between classical and Christian 
 writers was Philo the Jew, a contemporary of 
 Jesus, who made it the business of his life to 
 reinterpret the Mosaic scriptures in the terms of 
 Platonic Idealism, yet would not hesitate on oc- 
 casion to speak slightingly, even contemptuously, 
 of Plato in his desire to establish religion on a 
 basis other than merely human wisdom.* To 
 Philo, the Hebrew mystics of his own day were in 
 possession of a higher truth than the wisest of the 
 gentiles had been able to reach by means of their 
 uninspired philosophy. As secular studies con- 
 
 3 Meditations ii, 17. 
 
 4 See particularly, in his De Vita Contemplativa (which with 
 Conybeare I hold to be authentic), the account of the life of 
 study and fasting led by the sect of Therapeutae in Egypt, and 
 the contrast he draws between their modest Sabbathday 
 pannychides and the banquets of the Greeks as described in the 
 Symposia of Plato and Xenophon. 
 
6 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 tribute to the acquisition of philosophy, whose 
 servants they are, so, he says, philosophy is but 
 the contributary and handmaid of that divine 
 wisdom (sophia) with which religion really be- 
 gins. Philosophy, for purely human reasons, 
 may teach the control of the passions and the gov- 
 ernance of the tongue, and these indeed are de- 
 sirable in themselves, but they become a more 
 solemn and holy matter when practised for the 
 honour and good pleasure of God/ 
 
 To the earliest Christian writers, the so-called 
 Apostolic Fathers, philosophy was virtually non- 
 existent. Their immediate successors, upon 
 whom first fell the task of justifying the faith 
 intellectually, were in too precarious a position 
 to make concessions to their most dangerous 
 rivals, and among the Apologists of the middle 
 decades of the second century the prevailing note 
 is hatred and abuse of Greek philosophy .° Justin 
 is more generous than the others; but the real 
 change comes with Clement of Alexandria, whose 
 life-work in the Christian field was much like 
 that of Philo in the Jewish, an effort to enrich 
 religion with the spoils of Platonic Idealism 
 
 5 De Congressu Eruditionis Gratia 79. — Yet elsewhere, notably in 
 the De Vita Cotitemplativa, t] ttcit/jio? (f>iXoao(f)t,a is for him the 
 purest wisdom of religion. All these words are used now loosely, 
 and now strictly. 
 
 6 See, for instance, Tatian §§2, 25, 32; Athenagoras 11; Theo- 
 philus of Antioch iii, 3-8. 
 
COMPONENTS OF RELIGION 7 
 
 while still maintaining that revelation had 
 brought a higher kind of wisdom to mankind. 
 In his use of the word philosophy Clement is not 
 consistent. Sometimes it designates for him a 
 merely negative training in logic which will en- 
 able the believer to expose the errors of a hostile 
 sophistry ; at other times it is a moral discipline, 
 chastening the will and preparing the heart for 
 the reception of truth; while again it is adopted 
 boldly as a synonym for the revealed truth.^ But 
 in the main Clement follows the Philonic scheme 
 of a progress from secular studies to philosophy 
 and from this to divine wisdom,^ although his 
 Sophia has acquired a more definite content than 
 the Jew's, being now the perfect and self-suf- 
 ficient doctrine of the Word, the power and wis- 
 dom of God displayed in the economy of salva- 
 tion.^ 
 
 Later, when their rivals have been beaten from 
 the field and are no longer a serious menace, the 
 Doctors of the Church can afford to forget the 
 appropriation of the word philosophy to pagan 
 
 T Strtmata I, xx, 100; xvi, 80; xxviii, 177; xxix, 182; et passim. 
 
 8 See, for example, Stromata I, v, 30, where he simply para- 
 phrases the passage of Philo's De Cong. Er. noted above. Origen 
 has expressed the same notion, Philocalia xii, 1: 'Iv,' orrcp <j>a(n 
 (fn.Xocr6(^wv iraiSts TTcpt yeto/iCTptas Koi fiovaiKr/^, ypa/u./iuiTiK^S re 
 Kol pr)T0piK7J<i KOL acTTpovofxta^, is avvepidijiv (f>iXo(TO<^ta, roxid 
 ■^fitU eiTTOJ/icv Koi irepl avT^s </>iXo(ro^«is Trpos xP'O'TiavKT/xov. 
 
 9 Stromata I, xx, 100. 
 
8 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 wisdom, and do not hesitate to usurp it for their 
 special vocabulary. Thus, for instance, a popular 
 moralist like Chrysostom can appeal to the phi- 
 losophy of a mixed congregation almost in the 
 manner of a Lysias addressing the Senate of 
 Athens, while a theorist such as Gregory of Nyssa 
 feels no need to apologize or explain when he re- 
 fers to the whole Christian ethos as a "high phi- 
 losophy.'"*" The word, in its progress among 
 Christian writers from neglect to hostility, from 
 hostility to condescension, and from condescen- 
 sion to lordly appropriation, has come a complete 
 circle. Philosophy is no longer a humble prepara- 
 tion for a higher form of wisdom, as it was in 
 Philo and, at times, in Clement, but is itself the 
 norm of conduct and the supreme wisdom; it is 
 not contrary to religion, but a part or aspect of 
 religion. Yet still with this difference which 
 clings to it from its long history, that in Chris- 
 tianity the perception of truth has become secon- 
 dary to and dependent upon theological and 
 mythological dogma, whereas to the pagan it was 
 primary and free. This similarity and distinction 
 will grow clearer, I trust, as we proceed. 
 
 Meanwhile, before passing to the other con- 
 stituents of religion, it is important to observe a 
 
 10 For examples of this sliding use of the word see Chrysostom, 
 In Mat. 186d, 187d, 190c, 235b, 238e, 252d, 273c, 328a, In Phil. 21 Id; 
 Gregory, Cat. Or. 18 (with Srawley's note). 
 
COMPONENTS OF RELIGION 9 
 
 further distinction. In both the classical and the 
 late Christian writers the word philosophy, as we 
 have seen, had a double application. At one time 
 it was taken ethically, or practically, to designate 
 a certain self-mastery in conduct, while at another 
 time its sense is intellectual and seems to rise into 
 the region of pure intuition. The point I would 
 make is that no real inconsistency exists in this 
 double aspect of the word, and that even when 
 most theoretical philosophy still retains, in proper 
 usage, something of its simpler, practical value; 
 it implies always theory as concerned with actual 
 life and as resting on a definite experience of the 
 soul. In this way philosophy, as a study of the 
 deeper and more inward facts of consciousness, 
 was rightly contrasted with those encyclical, or 
 secular, studies (grammar, rhetoric, mathematics, 
 music, etc. ) which are its handmaids ; and, as still 
 pragmatic in its method, it was distinguished with 
 equal propriety, though perhaps not with equal 
 regularity, from those bastard overgrowths of 
 eristic, or metaphysics, which are its most inveter- 
 ate enemies for the very reason that they so subtly 
 resemble it. 
 
 In close connexion with the passage in which 
 Philo sets forth the friendly place of philosophy 
 between secular studies and the wisdom (sophia) 
 that looks to the honour of God, he states in 
 strong language the irreconcilable difference be- 
 
10 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 tween true philosophy and the abuse of reason to 
 which the name metaphysics may be restricted: 
 
 "As among physicians the so-called word-cure 
 offers no help for the sick — for diseases are cured 
 by medicine and surgery and diet, but not by 
 words — so in philosophy there are mere word- 
 dealers and word-catchers, who have no will or 
 skill to heal the life filled with ailments, but from 
 early youth to extreme old age are not ashamed 
 to squabble over opinions and syllables, as if hap- 
 piness la}^ in the endless and idle pursuit of terms, 
 and not in improving character as the source of 
 human life."" 
 
 The same condemnation of the logomachy of 
 metaphysics, as a caricature of genuine philoso- 
 phy, is one of the constant topics of the later 
 Christian philosophers. Clement of Alexandi-ia 
 returns to it again and again. ^" Gregory of Nazi- 
 anzus puts the case bluntly in the introduction to 
 his Theological Orations: "On what subjects 
 and how far should we philosophize? On those 
 subjects that are within our reach, and as far 
 as the mental state and faculty of the hearer 
 can follow." The whole trend of his argument 
 shows how clearly he saw that the dead hand of 
 
 11 De Cong. Er. 53. "Word-cure," Xoyiarpda. I do not know- 
 to what particular sect of faith-healers the title is applied. But 
 the term is not quite clearly defined by Liddell and Scott as 
 associated with Galen's Aoyiarpo?, "a physician only in words." 
 See Galen III, 145; VIII, 670. 
 
 12 i;. g. Stromata V, i, 5-7. 
 
COMPONENTS OF RELIGION 11 
 
 metaphysics takes hold of the mind only when 
 the soul has lost its birthright of self-knowledge 
 and is driven to chase shadows in place of sub- 
 stances. He would have subscribed heartily to 
 the saying of a modern divine who, like Milton, 
 had "some not insignificant taste for the sweet- 
 ness of philosophy," and was also well versed in 
 the long vexations of metaphysical debate : "The 
 genuine ground of all communion with the infin- 
 ite having sunk away within us, all sorts of logical 
 proofs, and logical disproofs, will quarrel to- 
 gether about primitive certainties that shroud 
 themselves from both."" 
 
 There is no serious difficulty in keeping the 
 sphere of philosophy separate in our mind from 
 the other two components of religion, and, so 
 far as it is a matter of mere terminology, there 
 would be no harm in emphasizing this separation 
 by limiting the word religion to designate the 
 sphere of theology and mythology taken together 
 as distinct from philosophy. That indeed was 
 the actual usage of many Greek writers, and we 
 too may find it convenient at times to employ 
 philosophy and religion, after the manner of 
 Philo, in this contrasted sense. It is a fact to be 
 remembered also that philosophy, so understood, 
 may be even antagonistic to religion. But gen- 
 erally, in the present volume at least, I propose 
 
 13 James Martineau, Essays I, 268. — See Appendix A. 
 
12 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 to take religion in its broader scope as embracing 
 philosophy as well as theology and mythology. 
 These terms have a way now of gliding one into 
 the other, and now of standing apart, as do the 
 subjects they connote. 
 
 By theology I mean, as its etymology implies, 
 the science of God, the consideration of His na- 
 ture in itself. Here again we have to face the 
 fact that the terminology at our command is a 
 part of the popular language, and as such is 
 commonly used without technical precision. 
 Theology is often extended to include a contem- 
 plative, even a metaphysical, study of the whole 
 field of the divine activity, and the poverty and 
 fluidity of our vocabulary may justify on occa- 
 sion this more general use of the word. But for 
 the purpose in hand we have a right to limit its 
 meaning to that j)art of religious theory which 
 Gregory of Nazianzus had in mind when he gave 
 to his orations against the Eunomians the dis- 
 tinctive title of Theological. His subject matter, 
 with insignificant deviations, is strictly that to 
 which I have limited theology in my definition, 
 that is, the bekig and nature of God, here re- 
 garded, as would be inevitable with a Christian, 
 in relation to the question of the Trinity as one 
 Deity subsisting in three persons. And it is note- 
 worthy that in his effort to unravel the perplex- 
 ities of this paradox, Gregory, while never for a 
 
COMPONENTS OF RELIGION 13 
 
 moment obliterating the boundaries between phi- 
 losophy and theology, does not disdain to fall 
 back upon the procedure and theorems of philoso- 
 phy to elucidate his theology. So in his most 
 eloquent passage on the divine vision, admitting 
 that all we can see of God is only as it were 
 the back parts, as beheld by Moses on Mount 
 Sinai — only the indications of Himself which He 
 has left behind Him in the wonder and majesty 
 of the created world — confessing that the reve- 
 lation of God as Father, Son, and Spirit is no 
 more than a clumsy translation into human 
 speech of truths that surpass human understand- 
 ing, Gregory compares the theologian who would 
 approach Deity to the philosopher in Plato's al- 
 legory of the cave, who, brought from darkness 
 face to face with the celestial world of Ideas, 
 cannot endure to raise his eyes forthright to their 
 ineffable glory, but must lower his gaze to their 
 shadowy images and reflections/* The ascent 
 of philosophy and theolog\^ are thus, in Gregory's 
 mind, parallel and may be taken one to illustrate 
 the other; but their goal and object are not the 
 same: one ends in the vision of the eternal Ideas, 
 the other looks to the knowledge of God. Re- 
 ligion should embrace both. 
 
 Theology and mythology, especially in the 
 Christian scheme, are never far apart, and in their 
 
 14 Or. Theol. ii, 3. 
 
14 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 confines actually merge together. The ground 
 on which they meet is the question of Providence. 
 In its more general aspect, however, Providence, 
 as an expression of the power and wisdom and 
 justice of God Himself, would properly come 
 under the range of theology ; and so, as we shall 
 see, it was treated by Plato. In Christianity the 
 classification is complicated by the double role of 
 one of the persons of the Trinity. Considered in 
 relation to the Logos as creator and governor of 
 the world, Providence remains fairly within the 
 competence of theology ; but as carried out in the 
 plan of salvation by the condescension of the 
 Logos to human nature and His reassumption of 
 human nature into deity it falls more specifically 
 under the head of mythology. For mythology is 
 just that part of religion which is concerned with 
 the intermingling of the divine and the human 
 spheres of being, whether made manifest by the 
 appearance of the gods among men, or looked 
 for in the extension of man's life into the world 
 of the gods. 
 
 As for the word mythology, we must admit 
 that it is totally rejected by the Christians, and 
 this for the obvious reason that it would seem 
 to place the Incarnation on the same level with 
 such myths of Greece as the amorous exploits of 
 Zeus among the daughters of men and the 
 scarcely less decorous adventures of Apollo, and 
 
COMPONENTS OF RELIGION 15 
 
 would assimilate the terrors of the judgment day 
 to the pains of Sisyphus in Hades and the 
 pleasures of the heroes in the islands of the Hes- 
 perides." Instead therefore of regarding the In- 
 carnation as a myth they preferred to speak of 
 it as the "economy," that is as God's particular 
 management of the human race so as to raise it 
 from its fallen estate; while to the judgment of 
 mankind at the divine tribunal and its conse- 
 quences they gave the name of "eschatology," the 
 science of the last things. If in our handling of 
 this department of religion we recur to the clas- 
 sical usage, it is because we have no better term 
 than myth to include the intermingling of the 
 two worlds whether exemplified in the doings of 
 the pagan gods, or in Plato's allegory of creation 
 and future judgment, or in the Christian econo- 
 my and eschatology. But we would adopt the 
 word without prejudice. Because the unsavoury 
 escapades of a pagan god are called m\i;hs, it does 
 not follow that any disrespect is intended to the 
 incarnation of Christ by treating it also under 
 the head of mythology. A myth may be false 
 and silly; it may be the veil, more or less trans- 
 parent, of sublime truth. 
 
 For the connexion of theology with mythology 
 and the distinction between them in Christian 
 literature one may refer to the Catechetical Ora- 
 
 15 Justin Martyr, Apology I, liv. 
 
16 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 Hon of Gregory of Nyssa, which is virtually con- 
 temporaneous with the Theological Orations of 
 the other Gregory/*' Of the forty chapters com- 
 posing the work of the Nyssean the first four are 
 theological, discussing in briefest terms the being 
 and nature of God as displayed in the Trinity. 
 The next four chapters deal with the more gen- 
 eral question of Providence as involved in the 
 creation of man and the origin of evil ; they serve 
 as a transition from the theological introduction 
 to the mythological argument (chapters ix-xl) 
 which occupies the remainder of the book. To 
 the narrowly orthodox this part of the work has 
 not been entirely acceptable, as showing traces 
 of the suspected doctrines of Origen. To the 
 less sensitive reader it may appeal as one of the 
 greater products of the Greek religious imagina- 
 tion, confused perhaps here and there in its logic 
 ( some groping is almost inherent in the nature of 
 the subject matter), yet on the whole presenting 
 the act of God's self-abasement to humanity and 
 the consequent restoration of humanity to its di- 
 vine perfection in the form of a stirring spiritual 
 drama. It is the sublimation of mythology; for 
 mythology, in the end, cannot be defined better 
 than as the drama of religion. 
 
 16 Another illustration may be found in the Contra Gentiles 
 and the De Incarnatione of Athanasius. The first is theology, 
 the second mythology. 
 
COMPONENTS OF RELIGION 17 
 
 Enough has been said, I trust, to show how 
 the analytical view of religion, as composed of 
 philosophy and theology and ,mythology, was 
 common to the Greek writers, both pagan and 
 Christian, from Plato to St. Chrysostom. The 
 elements remain the same ; but it is true also that 
 as we pass from pagan to Christian the order of 
 assurance and of temporal acquisition among 
 these elements undergoes a complete reversion, 
 and that the lesson we take to ourselves will de- 
 pend on our attitude towards what is no less than 
 a revolution within the circle of the Greek Tradi- 
 tion. To the pagan, particularly the Platonist, 
 philosophy was the dominating element ; here was 
 the starting point of religion and the sphere of 
 whatever certainty is attainable by man; here he 
 thought he was dealing with facts and was stand- 
 ing on a foundation of proved knowledge. In 
 theology he beheved he was still close to ascer- 
 tainable truth, yet removed a step from the re- 
 gion of immediate experience. Mythology car- 
 ried him further afield from positive assurance, 
 though it might be indispensable as the ex- 
 pression, more or less symbolical, of necessary 
 truths. The enlightened pagan might repudiate 
 as vigorously as the Christian the popular tales 
 of the gods, but, if he was humble as well as en- 
 lightened, he would continue to admit that only 
 through myth, purified of its extravagance, could 
 
18 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 he lay hold of that enigmatical intercourse be- 
 tween the human and the divine on which the 
 vigour of the religious life is largely dependent. 
 Perhaps no pagan understood this function of 
 the imagination better than Maximus of Tyre, a 
 preacher of Platonism in the days of Commodus. 
 "All things," he says, "are full of mystery 
 {ainigmaton) , both in the poets and in the [an- 
 cient] philosophers. And for my part I like 
 rather their spirit of reverence towards the truth 
 than the boldness of the moderns. For of mat- 
 ters dimly perceived by human weakness the more 
 becoming interpreter is mythology."" 
 
 The mind of the Christian moved in the oppo- 
 site direction. With him, so long at least as he 
 remained orthodox, what the pagan called myth- 
 ology was the starting point of religion and the 
 field of certainty. The incarnation, with the 
 whole economy of salvation, he regarded as a 
 verifiable historical event, in which the imagina- 
 tion had no part; unless this fact were nakedly 
 and objectively true his faith was vain and his 
 preaching a lie. Symbolism for him entered with 
 theology ; and though he might be ready to perish 
 for his conception of the Trinity, he would not 
 deny that his terms for the relation of the three 
 persons one to another were an inadequate trans- 
 lation into human speech of truths that surpassed 
 
 17 Philoso'phoumena iv, 5a. 
 
COMPONENTS OF RELIGION 19 
 
 mortal comprehension. In a way his theological 
 definitions were admittedly more symbolical than 
 the Platonist's. The divergence becomes again 
 complete when we pass to philosophy. Here, 
 where the Platonist thought he could move se- 
 curely if anywhere, the Christian, so far as he 
 distinguished philosophy from revelation, saw 
 only the blind groping of a ruined intelligence, 
 which, unaided by divine Grace, might catch a 
 glimpse, afar off and shrouded in clouds and thick 
 darkness, of its true home, but in the end must 
 sink into doubt and despair. 
 
 The full significance of this revolution of direc- 
 tion within what is essentially the same circle of 
 religious experience will be better understood 
 after we have completed our examination of Pla- 
 tonism and Christianity. For the present some 
 intimation of its nature may be conveyed by set- 
 ting side by side certain words of Socrates and 
 a passage from one of the Fathers. "A Hfe with- 
 out criticism, or reflection on its meaning, is un- 
 worthy of a man," says Socrates in the Apology; 38a 
 and more than once he declares that the only 
 thing worth while is to pass one's days conversing 
 about the great problems of conduct and dis- 
 cussing the definitions of good and evil. This is 
 the approach to rehgion by way of philosophy ; it 
 was Plato's way. With it may be compared a 
 characteristic saying of St. Basil in one of his let- 
 
W THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 ters: "For if to live for us is Christ, it follows 
 that our conversation ought to be about Christ, 
 our thought and our conduct should hang upon 
 his commands and our soul should be formed in 
 his likeness. "^^ That is the mythological ap- 
 proach to religion, the way of the Christian. 
 How conscious the ancient writers themselves 
 were of the diversity of the two ways, we may 
 learn from the common accusation brought 
 against the Christians that their rule was, "Do not 
 investigate, only believe." Origen, who quotes 
 the charge and comments on it,^^ could indeed 
 show by way of retort that the pagan philosopher 
 also was impelled to his initial choice of philoso- 
 phy by something resembling an unreasoning act 
 of faith. His reply would have been more ef- 
 fective here, if, as in many other passages of his 
 works, he had insisted that at least the Platonist 
 among pagans and the Christian, though starting 
 from opposite poles and moving in contrary di- 
 rections, were still traversing the same road 
 through the same broad land of rehgious faith. 
 Our present purpose is to examine the attitude 
 of Plato to the three components of religion. It 
 
 ^^Epistola clix (Migne). 
 
 19 Philocalia xviii, 1 (Contra Celsum i, 9) : M^ €$€Ta^€, aWa 
 TTio-Tevaov. See Greg. Thaum., In Orig. 14, for the application of 
 this to Origen's method of teaching. Socrates had said, Apology 
 38a: 'O Se dvclcTaoros /?to? ov /3i<dtos dvOpwirw. 
 
COMPONENTS OF RELIGION 21 
 
 will appear that not the smallest of his merits as 
 a religious writer is the clearness with which he 
 holds to the distinction between philosophy and 
 theology, and between theology and mythology, 
 while at the same time he sees how they flow one 
 into the other to form a single body of spiritual 
 life. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 PHILOSOPHY 
 TRANSLATION FROM THE REPUBLIC, BOOK II 
 
 [The first book of The Republic had been con- 
 cerned mainly with a refutation of the Nietz- 
 schean theory upheld by Thrasymachus, that nat- 
 ural justice is merely the right of the stronger to 
 grasp what he can. In the opening paragraphs 
 of the second book, which here follow in transla- 
 tion, the central thesis of the whole dialogue is set 
 forth by Glaucon and Adeimantus, the young 
 brothers of Plato, who demand from Socrates a 
 positive exposition of his own creed that it is 
 better, under all circumstances, to be just than to 
 be unjust.] 
 
 3S8B Glauco loquitur : I wish now you would listen 
 
 to me too, and see whether you agree with me. 
 For in my opinion Thrasymachus succumbed to 
 you, like a charmed snake, sooner than he ought, 
 and your demonstration of justice and injustice 
 does not yet satisfy my mind. I desire still to 
 hear what they actually are and how they operate 
 in the soul, each considered by itself and with no 
 regard to its rewards and results. With your 
 consent, therefore, I will proceed thus : taking up 
 
 22 
 
THE REPUBLIC, BOOK II 23 
 
 the argument from the point of view of Thrasy- 
 machiis, first I shall state the nature and origin 
 of justice in accordance with the views of these 
 men; secondly, I shall show that all those who 
 practise justice, practise it as a necessity, not as a 
 good, and, thirdly, I shall contend tliat their 
 attitude is reasonable, since, as they say, the life 
 of the unjust is far preferable to the life of the 
 just. Not, of course, that this is my own view; 
 but I am perplexed by the words of Thrasy- 
 machus and a thousand others dinning in my 
 ears, whereas to the present time I have never 
 heard from any one the argument that shows how 
 justice is preferable to injustice, as I should like 
 to hear it — an encomium of justice, I mean, 
 stripped of every accessory — and as I expect to 
 hear it from you by your leave. To this end I 
 shall exert myself to laud the unjust life, and my 
 manner of speaking will show you how I wish to 
 hear you censuring injustice and praising justice. 
 Now they say that in the nature of things to do 
 injustice is a good and to suffer injustice is an 
 evil, but that there is more of evil in suffering in- 
 justice than of good in doing it, and so when in- 
 justice is done and suffered and men have had a 
 taste of both, those who are unable to escape the 359 
 evil and take the good conclude that it is better 
 to come to an understanding which shall put an 
 end to one and the other. Hence the beginning of 
 
24 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 laws and mutual covenants ; hence that which the 
 law ordains gets. the name of lawful and just [as 
 distinguished from what is just by nature], and 
 tliis is the origin and essence of [so-called] jus- 
 tice, a compromise between the best state, where- 
 in a man should do injustice without punishment, 
 and the worst state, wherein he should suffer in- 
 justice without power to retaliate. And the just 
 life, as a compromise between these two, is toler- 
 ated not as a good, but as having a certain 
 honour from the common inability to pursue in- 
 justice. For no true man who had the ability to 
 effect his will would ever enter into such a con- 
 tract with another as would put an end to the 
 practising along with the suffering of injustice; 
 he would be mad to do so. This by common re- 
 port is the nature of justice, and hence its origin. 
 And that those who practise justice do so in- 
 voluntarily and by reason of impotence, we can 
 learn very clearly by resorting to a little fiction. 
 We will suppose that both men, the just and the 
 unjust, have the liberty to do exactly as they 
 please, and then we will follow them in imagina- 
 tion and see whither the desire of each leads him. 
 So we shall catch the just man, red-handed so to 
 speak, taking the same course as the imjust, led 
 on by that inborn self-interest which nature in- 
 evitably pursues as a good, when it is not diverted 
 by law and force into honouring equity. The 
 
THE REPUBLIC, BOOK II 26 
 
 kind of liberty I have in mind for them is hke the 
 power which the story gives to Gyges, the pro- 
 genitor of the Lj^dian hne. They say he was a 
 shepherd in the service of the king of Lydia, and 
 that once in a great storm and earthquake the 
 ground broke open and made a chasm where he 
 was pasturing his flock. Amazed at the sight, 
 he went down into the opening and beheld many 
 marvels which are related in the story — among 
 them a hollow horse of bronze, with doors through 
 which, by peering in, he saw what appeared to be 
 a dead body, but larger than an ordinary man. 
 From this body he took nothing but a gold ring 
 which was on its hand, and so reascended. 
 
 Afterwards when the shepherds held their 
 monthly assembly to send their report to the king 
 concerning the flocks, he came wdth the others, 
 having the ring on his finger. And as he sat 
 among them, he chanced to twist the collet of the 
 ring to the inside of his hand; whereupon he be- 36o 
 came invisible to the rest of them, and they began 
 to talk about him as if he had gone away. While 
 he was wondering at this, he chanced to finger 
 the ring again and to turn the collet out, and as 
 he did so he reappeared. Observing this result, 
 he went on to experiment with the ring to see 
 whether it had such a power, and he found that 
 when he turned it inwards he grew invisible, when 
 outwards visible. With this discovery in mind 
 
26 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 he took measures to be chosen one of the mes- 
 sengers to the comi;, and when he had come 
 thither, seduced the queen, and with her help at- 
 tacked and slew the king, and so made himself 
 master of the crown. 
 
 Suppose now that there were two such rings, 
 and that our just man wore one and our unjust 
 man the other. I suspect you would find no man 
 so adamantine that he would cling to justice and 
 have the nerve to refrain from putting his hand 
 on what was not his own, when it was in his power 
 to lift whatever he liked from the market with 
 impunity, and to enter a house and take his 
 pleasure with any one he chose, and to kill and 
 release from bonds at his good will, and in general 
 to comport himself among men as though he were 
 a god. In his actions he would differ in no re- 
 spect from the other man, but both would be 
 found pursuing the same end. Yet you would 
 certainly regard this as evidence that no one is 
 just by choice, but under compulsion, as deriving 
 no benefit from such a state, since wherever any 
 one thinks he has the liberty to be unjust, there he 
 is unjust. And in fact all men believe at heart 
 that injustice is far more profitable to them per- 
 sonally than justice, and believe rightly, as the 
 party for whom I am arguing will say. For if 
 any one with such liberty as we are supposing 
 should refrain resolutely from injustice and never 
 
THE REPUBLIC, BOOK II 27 
 
 lay hand on what was not his own, he would ap- 
 pear to lookers-on simply wretched and insen- 
 sate, although publicly they might commend him 
 and make a pretence of deceiving one another 
 for fear of suffering injustice themselves. So 
 much for our fiction. 
 
 Next let us turn to a direct judgment of the 
 two lives. And we shall be able to make such a 
 comparison fairly only by setting the most com- 
 pletely just man over against the most complete- 
 ly unjust man; and in no other way. And how is 
 this contrast to be effected? I answer: from the 
 unjust man we will take nothing that pertains to 
 injustice, and from the just man nothing per- 
 taining to justice, but will posit each as perfectly 
 fitted for his own manner of life. In the first 
 place, then, our rascal must have the address of 
 a clever craftsman. For instance a consummate 
 navigator or physician will distinguish between 
 the practicable and the impracticable in his art, 
 and will limit his undertakings accordingly; and sei 
 if by chance he makes a slip, he still knows how 
 to recover himself. In like manner our rascal, if 
 he is to be consummate in his kind, must be suc- 
 cessful in wrong-doing, and avoid detection, for 
 to be found out is to be weak, and the height of 
 injustice is to appear just without being so. 
 Therefore I say that in the completely unjust 
 man we must assume the most complete injustice. 
 
28 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 There is to be no reservation; but we shall allow 
 him, while performing the greatest acts of injus- 
 tice to acquire for himself the greatest reputation 
 for justice. If he falls into embarrassment, he 
 shall be able to extricate himself, by adroitness of 
 speech if any of his misdeeds have been informed 
 against, by more forcible methods where force is 
 required, being a fellow of audacity and energy 
 and in command of friends and money. Then by 
 the side of such an example let us set up for com- 
 parison the just man, in his noble simplicity, who 
 desires, as Aeschylus says, not to seem but to be 
 good.^ Here must be no seeming ; for if he shall 
 seem to be just, honours and rewards will flow to 
 him accordingly, and it will not be clear whether 
 he is what he is for the sake of justice or for the 
 sake of the rewards and honours. Strip him of 
 everything save his righteousness, and make him 
 in every respect the opposite of the other. Being 
 perfectly innocent, let him seem in the eyes of 
 mankind the most unjust of all, that his justice 
 may be tested by the fire of infamy and its con- 
 sequences. Let him not soften, but go on to the 
 hour of death, through all his days appearing to 
 be unjust but being just. Then indeed, when 
 they stand at the summit, one of justice and the 
 
 1 This is the famous line of the Seven Against Thebes (592) 
 describing Amphiaraus, which, according to Plutarch, drew the 
 eyes of all the spectators upon Aristides. 
 
THE REPUBLIC, BOOK II 29 
 
 other of injustice, we can judge between them 
 which is the happier. 
 
 The kind of hfe that awaits each of them is 
 only too easy to describe. I am bomid to go on 
 with the story, and if my language somids offen- 
 sive, you will understand that the words are not 
 really mine but belong to those who eulogize in- 
 justice as preferable to justice. They will tell 
 you that the just man who is reputed unjust 
 will be scourged and racked and bound, will 
 have his eyes burnt out, and finally after all 
 his torments will be impaled,^ and so will learn ^^^ 
 that he ought not to aim at being but at seem- 
 ing righteous. The sentiment of Aeschylus ap- 
 plies far more fitly to the unjust man; for in 
 truth, they will say, it is he who, pursuing the 
 
 2 From an early date this passage was applied to the passion 
 of Christ. Clement {Strom. V, xiv, 108) quotes the words and 
 calls them virtually a prophecy of the Incarnation. The same 
 view, to omit other references, is presented in a curious little 
 book of the seventeenth century by Merick Casaubon, entitled: 
 Of Credulity and Incredulity; in Things Divine and Spiritual: 
 Wherein, (among other things) a true and faithful account is 
 given of the Platonick Philosophy, as it hath reference to Chris- 
 tianity. "As for the Second," Casaubon says, "the manner of 
 his death, I think there is no antient writer almost but hath it; 
 and learned Orotius, in his observations upon Matthew; his judg- 
 ment is, that {nan sine Divinae Providentiae instinct u:) it was not 
 xtyithout an instinct of Divine Providence, that Plato did write so. 
 The passage is out of his Second Book de Repub. and goeth com- 
 monly, (that passage) under the notion or title De crucifixione 
 justi, or, of the crucifying of the just." 
 
30 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 reality of things and not living with a view to ap- 
 pearances, desires not to seem unjust, but to be — 
 
 "From the deep furrow reaping in his mind 
 The harvest of his counsels well-designed." 
 
 And this is his harvest: first, to be a ruler in 
 the city by reason of his reputation for justice, 
 and then to marry whence he pleases and give 
 in marriage to whom he pleases, do business and 
 associate with whom he likes, and always to his 
 own profit and advantage because he has no mis- 
 givings about the wrong. In any contest he en- 
 ters, whether private or public, he will succeed 
 and get the better of his rivals, and by this ad- 
 vantage will make himself rich and be in a po- 
 sition to help his friends and injure his enemies. 
 And for the same reason his sacrifices and gifts to 
 the gods will be appropriate and magnificent. 
 And so serving the gods and the people of his 
 choice better than any just man may, he naturally 
 will be dear to heaven, dearer than the innocent. 
 Thus, Socrates, they say that by the help of gods 
 and men a better life is the portion of the unjust 
 than of the just. . . . 
 
 Adeimantus loquitur: . . . Now, my dear Socra- 
 tes, when a young soul hears all this talk about 
 virtue and vice and the way honours are distrib- 
 uted by men and gods, what do you suppose he 
 will do? I mean the young man who is clever 
 
THE REPUBLIC, BOOK II 31 
 
 by nature and, like a bee on the wing, apt to flit 
 about among the sentiments of men, and gather 
 from them his own notion of the character and 
 procedure that will carry him through life most 
 prosperously. I think he is likely to repeat to 
 himself the words of Pindar: " 'Whether by the 
 straight path of justice or by the crooked ways of 
 deceit ascending the loftier citadel,'^ shall I forti- 
 fy myself for living? Everywhere I hear it said 
 that there is no profit for me in being just if I 
 also seem unjust, but toil and pain and manifest 
 loss, while an enchanting life is presented to me 
 if, following injustice, I acquire the reputation of 
 justice. Therefore since, as the wise inform me, 
 'seeming masters truth' and is lord of happiness, 
 to seeming I will wholly turn. As a vestibule 
 and front I must draw up about myself the pic- 
 tured semblance of virtue, but behind them I will 
 drag the subtle and shifty fox, as Archilochus, 
 that great sage, recommends. 'But it is not al- 
 ways easy,' somebody will say, 'to cover up one's 
 wickedness.' Nor is any other of the great ven- 
 tures a light matter, I should reply ; nevertheless, 
 if we are to be happy, the tracks of the argument 
 point in this direction, and so we must proceed. 
 To cover ourselves we will form secret societies 
 and clubs ; and there are the masters of persuasion 
 to teach us the art of addressing assemblies and 
 
 3 Fragment 313, Bergk. 
 
32 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 courts, by which art, persuading where we can- 
 not domineer, we shall contrive to avoid the pen- 
 alties of overreaching. 'Still it is not possible to 
 use concealment or force with the gods.' Very 
 good. But if, on the one hand, there are no gods, 
 or if they have no care for what mankind is doing, 
 why should we trouble ourselves about conceal- 
 ment? And if, on the other hand, they do exist 
 and have a care for men, yet all we know and 
 have heard about them is from law and custom 
 and from the genealogical tales of the poets, and 
 from these we learn that they can be cajoled and 
 diverted by 'sacrifice and soothing prayers' and 
 offerings. We ought to accept the whole tradi- 
 tion or none of it. And if we accept it, then let 
 us overreach as we will, and make sacrifice out of 
 our profits. By justice we shall simply come off 
 •^66 unscathed from the gods, while forgoing the 
 profit of injustice; by injustice we shall have our 
 gain and still, with our prayers and propitiations, 
 shall come off unscathed through transgression 
 and sin. 'But there is yet Hades, where we, and 
 perhaps our children, must undergo judgment for 
 our sins in this world.' And also, my friend," 
 our fellow will reply, making his calculation, 
 "there are the mysteries and the gods of redemp- 
 tion, and these have great power, as the mightiest 
 cities declare, and as the poets, who are children 
 
THE REPUBLIC, BOOK II 33 
 
 of the gods, and the prophets of the gods agree in 
 proclaiming." 
 
 What reason then remains that we should pre- 
 fer justice to injustice of that great sort, whereby, 
 if we combine it with a deceitful regard for ap- 
 pearances, we shall fare to our taste among gods 
 and men, in this world and the next, as the ma- 
 jorit}^ of voices, and those not the least weighty, 
 assure us? Considering all these arguments, Soc- 
 rates, how can you expect to win honour for jus- 
 tice from any one endowed with superiority of 
 soul or wealth or body or family, or expect aught 
 but laughter when he hears it commended? And 
 even the rare man, granted his existence, who 
 can expose the falsity of these arguments and has 
 a clear perception of the supremacy of justice, is 
 quite ready to pardon, and forbears to be angry 
 with the unjust; for he knows that nobody is just 
 by choice, however by reason of timidity or old 
 age or some other weakness he censures what he 
 is impotent himself to accomplish — nobody at 
 least save by virtue of a divine gift of nature 
 which inspires him with disgust of wrong, or else 
 by the acquisition of knowledge. This is clear. 
 For let your pretender once acquire power, and 
 he practises injustice to the best of his ability. 
 
 The cause of all this confusion, Socrates, was 
 intimated by my brother and me at the beginning 
 of the argument, when we declared our astonish- 
 
34 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 ment that of all the professed panegyrists of 
 justice, including yourself, from the earliest 
 heroes of whom we know anything to the present 
 race, not one has ever censured injustice or com- 
 mended justice for anything except the reputa- 
 tion and honours and benefits that pertain to 
 them. But as for the intrinsic operation of each 
 in the soul which harbours it, hidden from the 
 sight of gods and men, no one has ever yet de- 
 scribed this adequately in verse or prose, or shown 
 that of all the evils which the soul possesses in 
 itself injustice is the worst, whereas justice is the 
 ^67 greatest good. Had this been the train of rea- 
 soning adopted by you moralists from the begin- 
 ning and your manner of instructing us from 
 childliood, we should not now be guarding one 
 another against injustice, but each would be his 
 own best guardian, fearful lest by wrong-doing 
 he should attach to himself the greatest evil. 
 
 These, and doubtless more of the sort, would 
 be the pleas of Thrasymachus or his fellows in 
 regard to justice and injustice. It is all a gross 
 perversion of the true nature of things, as I am 
 bound to think; but, to confess my purpose 
 frankly, I have put the matter as strongly as 
 possible in the desire of hearing the other side 
 from you. I beg you not to stop with asserting 
 the mere superiority of justice over injustice, but 
 do you demonstrate the immediate effect of each 
 
THE REPUBLIC, BOOK II 35 
 
 upon its jDossessor, by which one is essentially an 
 evil thing and the other a good thing. And, as 
 Glaucon insisted, do not argue on the basis of 
 reputation and appearance. Unless you sup- 
 press what rightly belongs to each in this respect, 
 and grant what is false, we shall retort that you 
 are lauding not justice but its appearance, and 
 that your censure is not for being but for seem- 
 ing unjust; which is tantamount to bidding us 
 practise injustice if we can avoid detection. We 
 shall say that you really agree with Thrasy- 
 machus in regarding justice as another man's 
 good, the interest of the stronger, and injustice 
 as one's own interest and advantage, though in- 
 jurious to the weaker. Since then you have ad- 
 mitted that justice belongs to that highest class of 
 goods, which are desirable to possess for their 
 consequences and still more for themselves, like 
 seeing, hearing, wisdom, and health, and what- 
 ever else is vitally good in its own nature rather 
 than in appearance, I will ask you now to direct 
 your panegyric to this one point. Show how of 
 itself justice brings a blessing to the possessor, 
 whereas injustice harms him, and leave to others 
 the commendation of rewards and appearances. 
 I might be content to hear others praising justice 
 and censuring injustice in that way, magnifying 
 the appearances and rewards of one and the 
 other; but not you, unless you so bid me, since 
 
36 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 this is a subject you have spent your whole life 
 in considering, this and no other. Do not stop 
 then with asserting the mere superiority of jus- 
 tice over injustice, but demonstrate the immediate 
 effect of each upon its possessor, whereby, whether 
 hidden or not from gods and men, one is essen- 
 tially a good thing and the other an evil thing. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 PHILOSOPHY : JUSTICE AND THE SOUL 
 
 What religion in the most general sense meant 
 to Plato he has expressed in a memorable pas- 
 sage of the Theaetetus: 
 
 "But it is not possible that evils should cease 
 to be — since by reason of necessity there must al- 
 ways be something contrary to the good — neither 
 can they have their seat among the gods, but of 
 necessity they haunt mortal nature and this re- 
 gion of ours. Wherefore our aim should be to 
 escape hence to that other world with all speed. 
 And the way of escape is by becoming like to God 
 in so far as we may. And the becoming like is in 
 becoming just and holy by taking thought. . . . 
 God is never in any wise unjust, but most per- 
 fectly just, and there is nothing more like to him 
 than one of us who should make himself just to 
 the limit of man's power." 
 
 That is an idea on which Plato was fond of 
 dwelling, and which never after was to leave the 
 Greek consciousness. Its echo will be found 
 everywhere in the pagan Platonists of a later age. 
 It is the substance of the Plotinian ethics ; and in 
 Maximus of Tyre, to mention only one of the 
 
 37 
 
 176a 
 
38 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 lesser lights, it lends point and gravity to a finely 
 conceived little sermon on friendship/ For the 
 Christian the idea easily connected itself with the 
 statement of Genesis that man was made in the 
 likeness of God, and with the command of Jesus 
 to do good to them that hate us that we may be- 
 come like to our Father in heaven; and in this 
 form, sometimes dressed in the exact phraseolo- 
 gy of Plato, it permeates the whole course of 
 Christian literature." 
 
 Now it is sufficiently clear that this conception 
 of homoiosis (becoming like to God), as the cen- 
 tral fact to Plato of the religious life, involves 
 both theology and mythology, involves, that is to 
 say, both the knowing of what God is and the 
 bringing together of God and man. But at this 
 point the more important matter to consider is 
 the part taken in it by philosophy. If we should 
 say that the answer to this question depends on 
 
 1 Philosophoumena xxxv, 2d: "How then should men become 
 like to God? By imitating that in him which is preservative 
 and friendly and paternal. This is a mortal likeness to divine 
 virtue, which among the gods is called right and justice and by 
 other mystical and godlike names, and among men is called friend- 
 ship and graciousness and by other kindly and human names." 
 
 2 It appears in the first of the Apostolic Fathers (I Clement 
 xxxiii); it is a constant thought of Chrysostom (e.g. In Mat. 
 23Sb, 339a). Perhaps the most notable passage is that in which 
 Clement of Alexandria (Stromata II, xix, xx), taking the words 
 of the Theaetetus as his text, so expounds them as to merge Pla- 
 tonism and Christianity in one beautiful blend. 
 
JUSTICE AND THE SOUL 39 
 
 whether we hold the becoming just to precede 
 logically the becoming like to God or the con- 
 trary, we might seem to be indulging in a verbal 
 quibble ; yet in truth it is on precisely such a dis- 
 tinction that the difference between the religious 
 procedure of Platonism and Christianity turns. 
 We become like the gods by becoming just, Plato 
 says ; and in the same way we become dear to the 
 gods, since like, as the proverb runs, is always Lysis 214b 
 dear to like. Very good ; but what is the relation 
 between justice and the divine nature ? Is justice 
 that which God wills, or does God will that which 
 is just? Is justice dear to Him because it is His 
 will, or does He will justice because it is dear to 
 Him? Is the conception of justice and holiness 
 prior in our minds to our conception of God, or 
 is our conception of God prior to the conception 
 of justice and holiness? That is a question first 
 raised by Plato, and from that day to this it has 
 not ceased to trouble the current of theological 
 thinking; its answer, determining whether phi- 
 losophy or theology and mythology shall guide 
 and dominate religion, is fraught with momentous 
 consequences. 
 
 Suppose a Christian and a Platonist con- 
 fronted by the dilemma presented in the sceptical 
 philosophy of Sextus Empiricus: 
 
 "Again, if the divine exists, either it has virtue 
 or it has not. If it has not, then the divine is a 
 
40 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 poor and wretched thing, — an absurd conclusion. 
 If it has, then there will be something greater, or 
 higher, than God; for as the virtue of a horse is 
 greater, or higher, than the horse itself, and as the 
 virtue of man is greater, or higher, than the pos- 
 sessor, in the same way the virtue of God will be 
 greater, or higher, than God himself. But if it is 
 greater, or higher, than God, evidently God, as 
 deficient in nature, will be a poor thing and sub- 
 ject to corruption. But if there is no middle term 
 between these opposites, and God cannot be seen 
 to fall under either of them, then we must say 
 that God is not.'" 
 
 From the horns of this dilemma the Christian 
 would escape by denying that either "has" or "has 
 not" is applicable to the relation of God to virtue ; 
 virtue will be whatever God is. He does not pos- 
 sess but is the source of virtue. The logical posi- 
 tion of Christianity, however individual theolog- 
 ians may have wavered in their judgment, is to 
 make justice and holiness depend on the fiat of 
 God ; a thing is right because God so commands.* 
 
 sAdv. Physicos i, 176. 
 
 4 As a matter of fact Christian theologians have not been con- 
 sistent on this point. So, for instance, Jonathan Edwards, as an 
 extreme Calvinist, leads the good and evil of the world logically 
 up to God's arbitrary decree that such should be, yet he bases 
 the righteousness of that decree on God's choice of "the moral 
 good which He sees" (upon a principle, that is, outside of and 
 superior to God's being), and on an aboriginal distinction "be- 
 tween different objects that are proposed to the Divine Under- 
 standing." (See Shelburne Essays XI, 59.) 
 
JUSTICE AND THE SOUL 41 
 
 Plato, on the contrary, virtually throws himself 
 upon the second horn of the dilemma, though he 
 would repudiate vehemently the inference that 
 because God is in any way deficient He should 
 therefore be held a poor thing or subject to cor- 
 ruption. At least in the Timaeus, as we shall see 
 when we come to consider Plato's mythology, he 
 sets the ultimate source of good and evil outside 
 of the divine nature, evil being below God, and 
 good in a way, as that which He imitates in the 
 act of creation, above God. 
 
 This question touching the primacy of the 
 moral law or of the divine will is raised only in- 
 directly in the Timaeus. In the Euthyphro it is ioa a. 
 put categorically as a matter fundamental to 
 ethics and religion, but is left without clear an- 
 swer. The solution, Plato implies, can be reached 
 only when we have learned what justice in itself 
 is, and to the solving of this problem he devotes 
 the long dialogue of The Republic, to which the 
 Euthyphro, together with the Gorgias, serves as a 
 kind of preface. The problem is stated with the 
 utmost precision and emphasis in the introduc- 
 tory paragraphs of the second book of The Re- 
 public, a translation of which is given in the pre- 
 ceding chapter. In the tenth book of the Laws, sssb 
 where Plato unfolds his great theological argu- 
 ment, the controversy will be directed against 
 those who deny the existence of the gods, or, ad- 
 
42 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 mitting their existence, reject their providential 
 government of man, or believe they can be recon- 
 ciled to man's evil-doing by bribery. These three 
 theses he will lay down explicitly as the basis of 
 theology: the being of the gods, the Providence 
 of the gods, and their inexorable justice. Now, 
 in the exordium to the argument of The Republic, 
 he isolates the problem of philosophy by a hypo- 
 36Sd thetical denial of just these three theses.^ "There- 
 fore," so the supposition runs, "if on the one 
 hand there are no gods, or if they have no care for 
 what mankind is doing, why should we trouble 
 ourselves about concealment? And if, on the 
 other hand, they do exist and have a care for men, 
 yet all we know and have heard about them is 
 from law and custom and from the genealogical 
 tales of the poets, and from these we learn that 
 they can be cajoled and diverted by 'sacrifice and 
 soothing prayers' and offerings." Thus the task 
 set before Socrates is to discover the nature of 
 justice (righteousness, that is, or essential moral- 
 ity) in itself, and to determine whether it is better 
 to pursue justice for its own sake apart from all 
 
 5 I cannot understand the frame of mind of Rohde (see Psyche 
 II, 265 note) and other scholars who take these passages as evi- 
 dence that at one time Plato did not believe in the immortality 
 of the soul, and first introduced the belief paradoxically in the 
 tenth book. It should seem that the hypothetical nature of the 
 denial was sufficiently emphasized to forestall any such interpre- 
 tation. 
 
JUSTICE AND THE SOUL 43 
 
 external rewards in this world and the next. To 
 this end Socrates and his friends compare the 
 perfectly just man with the perfectly mi just 
 man; and in order that all disturbing complica- 
 tions may be eliminated they imagine the just 
 man subjected to the many physical ills of life 
 and burdened with the reputation of injustice, 
 whereas the unjust man shall enjoy every sort of 
 physical comfort and all the honours awarded to 
 the appearance of probity and magnanimity. 
 They go further, and suppose, for the sake of 
 the argument, that there are no gods at all or 
 no Providence, or that, like men, the gods, if they 
 exist, can be cheaply hoodwinked. It is not easy 
 to see how the central problem of philosophy 
 could be severed more absolutely from every theo- 
 logical and mythological disturbance, or how the 
 law of righteousness could be set up more unmis- 
 takably as a consideration prior to the being and 
 nature of God. One thing is manifest, that for 
 Plato in philosophy, thus regarded, religion has 
 its true beginning and finds its desired assurance. 
 Here, in the knowledge of a truth which has its 
 own immediate sanction, rests in the last resort 
 our hope of spiritual peace; whatever follows, 
 and much of deep unportance is to follow, is but 
 complementary, receding further and further into 
 the shadows of uncertainty and conjecture as we 
 proceed outwards from this central illumination. 
 
44 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 What then is this justice, or righteousness, so 
 desirable in itself? The arguments on which 
 Plato bases his answer to this question, the very 
 heart indeed of what is meant by Platonism, I 
 have attempted to expound in the volume intro- 
 ductory to the present series, and shall not re- 
 peat here. But as to the quality of justice, if it 
 can be defined by any single term, it is by the 
 word measure, — the outcome of that last, undis- 
 covered force within a man, which acts as a check 
 and stay upon the restless, imperious, tumultuous 
 impulses and desires and emotions ever swelling 
 out of the dark background of life, a force which, 
 itself unseen, brings order out of disorder, pro- 
 portion out of excess, balance out of discord, peace 
 out of agony, out of the unmeasured measure. 
 Plato's doctrine of justice is in fact a compen- 
 dium of the results of what Greek thought had 
 come to be in the pre-Socratic age; and from 
 Plato it was passed on to Aristotle, who builds 
 on it a systematic scheme of ethics as determined 
 by the law of the golden mean, and a system of 
 metaphysics as determined by the law of form. 
 
 If justice is this inner law of measure, balance, 
 health, how shall its attainment be known; what 
 is the mark by which its possession is made mani- 
 fest? Here again we perceive the diverging ways 
 of religion as it starts from mythology or from 
 philosophy. For the religious man whose faith 
 
JUSTICE AND THE SOUL 45 
 
 is founded primarily on mythology there is no 
 certainty in the life of righteousness save in the 
 judgment to come — 
 
 "As he pronounces lastly on each deed, 
 Of so much fame in heaven expect thy meed." 
 
 Without this expected reversal of the conditions 
 of the actual world there is no moral law; right 
 and wrong, justice and injustice, are but empty 
 names; we live under clouds of confusion and 
 ignorance beyond which rides no sun. For the 
 Christian our existence must ever be a state of 
 hope nourished by belief in the particular myth 
 of Christ's redeeming act of sacrifice, and if we 
 are deceived in this belief, then are we, as St. 
 Paul says, "of all men most miserable."*' New- 
 man is not afraid to put the condition even more 
 emphatically : 
 
 "Our duty as Christians lies in this, in making 
 ventures for eternal life without absolute cer- 
 tainty of success. ... If then faith be the essence 
 of a Christian life, and if it be what I have now 
 described, it follows that our duty lies in risking 
 upon Christ's word what we have, for what we 
 have not ; and doing so in a noble, generous way, 
 not indeed rashly or lightly, still without knowing 
 accurately what we are doing, not knowing 
 either what we give up, nor again what we shall 
 gain; uncertain about our reward, uncertain 
 
 6 I Corinthians xv, 19. 
 
46 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 about our extent of sacrifice, in all respects lean- 
 ing, waiting upon Him, trusting in Him to ful- 
 fil His promise, trusting in Him to enable us to 
 fulfil our own vows, and so in all respects pro- 
 ceeding without carefulness or anxiety about the 
 future."' 
 
 I am not holding a brief against Christianity, 
 nor, as I have said before, have I any intention of 
 prejudicing the case by the use of the word 
 "myth." My purpose here is simply to draw out 
 the difference between the two approaches to the 
 religious life. For it was exactly the hypothesis 
 of Plato that this judgment to come should be 
 eliminated, and that by an exaggeration of the 
 apparent confusions of this life the difficulty of 
 determining right and wrong should be faced 
 without flinching. His method has at least the 
 merit of boldness. Let the man assumed to be 
 just suffer all the ills that should seem to belong 
 to injustice, let the man assumed to be unjust 
 enjoy the advantages that should seem to belong 
 to justice, yet one sign nevertheless the man him- 
 self has, one infallible criterion, to know his own 
 state, viz. the inner sense, now and immediate, of 
 happiness or misery. And this inner sense, Plato 
 declares, is so much more significant than all ex- 
 ternal conditions that the pursuit of justice is 
 preferable at any cost; so far do the awards of 
 
 7 Parochial and Plain Sermons IV, xx. Compare Pascal's pari. 
 
JUSTICE AND THE SOUL 47 
 
 conscience outweigh whatever the emotions and 
 physical senses can give, that any man who has 
 learned to distinguish his own feelings need have 
 no hesitancy in determining the general path of 
 righteousness and in preferring that path to every 
 other. Clement of Alexandria summed up the 
 essence of Platonism in a memorahle sentence: 
 "Plato himself says that happiness {eudaimonia) 
 is the well-being of the daemon, and that by the 
 daemon is meant the governing element of the 
 soul, and that the most perfect and fullest good is 
 this happiness."^ And the same definition of 
 Plato's summum honum was given by the great 
 sceptic, who then seeks to undermine its basis as 
 follows : 
 
 "This is as much as to say that, in order to com- 
 prehend human happiness (eudai7nonia) , we 
 must first have a conception of God and daemon, 
 and in order to comprehend God, we must first 
 have a conception of the happy man (eudaimonos 
 anthrojyou) . Therefore the conception of each 
 depends upon the conception of the other, and 
 both are inconceivable."^ 
 
 The argument is cleverly turned ; but, however 
 it might apply to Christian theology, it has no 
 bearing upon Plato's philosophy. The daemon 
 involved in the Platonic conception of happiness 
 
 8 Stromata II, xxii, 131. 
 
 9 Sextus Empiricus, Adv. Phynicos i, 47. 
 
48 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 is not to be taken as a power outside of our imme- 
 diate experience, but as emphatically a power of 
 the soul, as the very soul. The knowledge of the 
 daemon and the knowledge of happiness are one 
 and the same act of self-knowledge." 
 
 Philosophy then may be defined to be the soul's 
 discovery of itself, as an entity having a law and 
 interests of its own apart from and above all this 
 mixed and incomprehensible life of the body. 
 That I take it — the soul's deep content in the 
 recognition of itself — is the beginning of the Pla- 
 tonic religion and, if not the beginning, certainly 
 the consummation of Christianity. I would say 
 it was the essential matter of all religion, were it 
 not for the strange phenomenon of a great orien- 
 tal faith which has succeeded in preaching the 
 doctrine of salvation and happiness without it. 
 In one of the most interesting historically of the 
 Buddhist books we have the report of a conversa- 
 tion between Menander ( Milinda, in the Pali ) , 
 a Greek king of the Pun j ab in the second century 
 B. C.J and the saint Nagasena on this very topic, 
 
 10 Sallust, a friend of the Emperor Julian, was recalling this 
 thesis of philosophy, though his words were not quite such as 
 Plato would have chosen, when he said: "The souls of the good 
 return purified back to the gods; and even were this not so, yet 
 would virtue itself and the pleasure and glory of virtue, the life 
 without pain or master, suflBce for the happiness of the virtuous" 
 (De Diis et Mundo 21, as abridged by Zeller, Die Philosophie der 
 Griechen V, 667). 
 
JUSTICE AND THE SOUL 49 
 
 with the result that the Greek, not well fortified, 
 it must be admitted, in dialectic, is driven to 
 assent to a purely nominalistic argument against 
 the existence of the soul as an individual entity. 
 And the same conclusion is drawn in various 
 passages of other books, as, for instance, in these 
 words of the Fisuddhi-BIagga: 
 
 "Just as the word 'chariot' is but a mode of 
 expression for axle, wheels, chariot-body, pole, 
 and other constituent members, placed in a cer- 
 tain relation to each other, but when we come to 
 examine the members one by one, we discover 
 that in the absolute sense there is no chariot ; and 
 just as the word 'house' is but a mode of expres- 
 sion for wood and other constituents of a house, 
 surrounding space in a certain relation, but in the 
 absolute sense there is no house ; ... in exactly the 
 same way the words 'living entity' and 'Ego' are 
 but a mode of expression for the presence of the 
 five attachment groups, but when we come to 
 examine the elements of being one by one, we 
 discover that in the absolute sense there is no liv- 
 ing entity there to form a basis for such figments 
 as 'I am,' or 'I'; in other words, that in the abso- 
 lute sense there is only name and form. The in- 
 sight of him who perceives this is called know- 
 ledge of the truth."" 
 
 11 H. C. Warren, Buddhism in Translations 133. See also E. W. 
 Hopkins, The Religions of India 335. — A like nominalistic dissec- 
 tion of the soul is placed by Plato in the mouth of Diotima 
 
50 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 To Buddha, with his settled abhorrence of any- 
 thing savouring of metaphysical entities, the 
 question of the soul, when he is pressed for an 
 answer, is simply brushed aside as one not tend- 
 ing to edification; only this he will pronounce as 
 a certainty, that the effects of a man's deeds are 
 unescapable in this life and endure after him as 
 the condition of a new life, so that it behooves us 
 to strive earnestly for righteousness/^ In other 
 words Buddha taught the doctrine of Karma, 
 the inevitable law of cause and effect in the moral 
 order, rather than metempsychosis as we under- 
 stand it. Yet withal the fact that a man may 
 recover the memory of past lives shows that even 
 for him these successive existences are in some 
 way strung together on a thread of consciousness, 
 however useless and disturbing it may be to dis- 
 cuss the nature of this binding thread. 
 
 Whatever weight we may give to this oriental 
 view, certainly to Socrates the mission of the 
 philosopher was to preach just this doctrine of 
 the soul as a living entity with its own rights and 
 its own law. When he stood before the court of 
 
 {Symposium 207d ff). But Plato leaves the desire of immor- 
 tality by succession of father and son and by propagation of 
 virtue in others as a sjiur to noble actions. And in the end 
 this immortality by succession is shown to be only an image of 
 the true immortality, which belongs to the individual by reason 
 of his contemplation of the eternal Ideas. After all the soul is. 
 12 Majjhima-Nikdya Sutta 63. 
 
JUSTICE AND THE SOUL 51 
 
 Athens to defend himself as the true Athenian, 
 he spoke the message once for all for our western 
 world : 
 
 "While there is breath to me and I am able I ^p°i°«y 29d 
 will not cease from the life of philosophy, neither 
 will I desist from admonishing you. And whom- 
 soever of you I meet, with him will I argue as 
 my wont is and say to him: My good friend, 
 you who belong to Athens, this city great and 
 glorious for wisdom and power, are you not 
 ashamed that your life is given up to the winning 
 of mucli money and reputation and rank, while 
 for wisdom and truth and the good of your own 
 soul you care not and have no concern? And if 
 he disputes and asserts his care for these things, 
 I will not quickly let him go or leave him, but 
 will question and examine him and put him to 
 the proof; and if then he seems to claim a virtue 
 which he does not possess, I will rebuke him be- 
 cause the things of most value he little esteems, 
 but prizes those of meaner worth. . . . For this, 
 I assure you, is the command of the god; and I 
 think no greater blessing has ever befallen you 
 in the city than this my service to the god. For 
 I do nothing else but go about persuading you, 
 young and old, not to take thought first for your 
 bodies and for money, but more diligently to con- 
 sider the good of your own souls." 
 
 Such at least are the words put into the mouth 
 of Socrates by one who was present at the trial, 
 
5£ THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 and there can be little doubt that they indicate 
 faithfully the source of his power. In a letter to 
 Themistius the Emperor Julian, who almost at 
 the close of our period sought to revive the old 
 pagan faith, not understanding that Christianity 
 was the most legitimate heir of what was best in it, 
 wrote : 
 
 "The achievements of Alexander the Great are 
 outdone in my eyes by Socrates son of Sophronis- 
 cus. It is to him I ascribe the wisdom of Plato, 
 the fortitude of Antisthenes, the generalship of 
 Xenophon, the Eretriac and Megaric philoso- 
 phies, with Cebes, Simmias, Phaedo, and count- 
 less others. To him too we owe the colonies that 
 they planted, the Lyceum, the Stoa, and the 
 Academies. Who ever found salvation in the 
 victories of Alexander? . . . Whereas it is thanks 
 to Socrates that all who find salvation in philoso- 
 phy are being saved even now."" 
 
 It was because Plato alone of all Socrates' dis- 
 ciples felt the full weight of his spiritual affir- 
 mation, and saw that it was not contradicted by 
 the Socratic scepticism or endangered by the So- 
 cratic rationalism, but received confirmation from 
 them — for this reason Plato became the true 
 spokesman of the Greek Tradition, whereas the 
 other disciples of Socrates are known to us rather 
 
 13 Quoted by Professor Burnet in The Socratic Doctrine of the 
 Soul. 
 
JUSTICE AND THE SOUL 63 
 
 as the heads of schools, the schismatics and he- 
 resiarchs of philosophy so to speak. 
 
 Philosophy then, as Plato understood it, leads 
 first of all to an obvious distinction between soul 
 and body. Yet this is not the whole story ; indeed 
 it is fair to say that much of the pseudo-Platon- 
 ism of a later age, especially as it took the form 
 of a crass asceticism, may be traced to a failure 
 to carry Plato's dualism to its genuine source. 
 For with Plato the deeper meaning of the search 
 for righteousness lay not in a mechanical division 
 between soul and body, but in a sense of division 
 within the soul itself. We shall have occasion 
 to study the relation of this psychic dualism to 
 the connexion of soul and body more fully when 
 we come to our exposition of the mythology of 
 the Timaeus; it will be sufficient here to point to 
 the notable passage of the tenth book of The Re- eoso ff. 
 public in which Socrates contends that the real 
 evil of the soul is nothing external to its nature, 
 not a property of the body, but a quality of the 
 soul itself, working within the soul its own per- 
 version and misery. This is the thought carried 
 out in that eloquent diatribe on the honour and 
 dishonour of the soul, which introduces the fifth 
 book of the Z/ttW* : "To every man his all is dual. 726 
 To the stronger and better things pertains mas- 
 tery, to the lesser and baser servitude ; wherefore 
 
54 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 always a man should honour the master parts of 
 himself above the servile." 
 
 The dualism of the soul itself could not be ex- 
 pressed more categorically than in these pas- 
 sages; nevertheless it is in immediate sequence 
 to the clear statement of The Republic just 
 quoted that Plato introduces the well-known 
 simile of Glaucus, the sea-god. As the body of 
 Glaucus was scarcely recognizable by reason of 
 the overgrowth of shells and weeds clinging about 
 it, and by reason of the mangling and distortion 
 it had suffered from the waves, so we see the soul 
 befouled by its association with the body and mis- 
 shapen by the other evils that hang upon it. Yet 
 not thus ought we to regard it, but should look 
 thither, to its philosophy, and consider its higher 
 contacts and what purer intercourse it desires, as 
 being in its essence related to the divine and eter- 
 nal, and should contemplate it as it may be when 
 drawn by its innate aspiration out of this sea in 
 which it is now immersed, and when beaten free, 
 so to speak, of these earthy and savage accoutre- 
 ments that grow upon it amidst its so-called 
 blessed revellings. Then indeed we should know 
 the soul as it truly is, not as we seem to know it 
 through the passions of this human life. 
 
 There is, let us acknowledge, an inconsistency, 
 unless we choose to call it a mere imperfection of 
 terminology, to be reckoned with here. At one 
 
JUSTICE AND THE SOUL 65 
 
 time, as in the famous image of the chariot, Plato Phaedrus 
 speaks of the soul as "composite," having within 
 itself a faculty which reaches upwards to the di- 
 vine, and a power also which pulls it downwards 
 to the baser contaminations of the flesh; at an- 
 other time he defines it as "incomposite" and akin Phaedo 78c 
 by its very simplicity to what is unchanging and 
 incorruptible. The fact is that Plato is here 
 brought up against the insoluble paradox of the 
 dualism of human nature, the same paradox 
 which in Christianity was to be stated mytho- 
 logically in the dogma of the one person and two 
 natures of Christ/* Sometimes our real person- 
 ality seems to reside in that portion of our being 
 which is divine and uncontaminated by the world, 
 in the soul, that is to say, considered apart from 
 
 14 Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Platon II, 220: "Eine Entscheidung 
 gibt Platon nicht, sagt vielmehr ausdriicklich [Republic] 612a 
 €?Te TToXvctSiy? etre /xovoctS^^-" The same uncertainty wQl be found 
 in St. Paul, who at one time contrasts rrvevfia, "spirit," and adpi, 
 "flesh," and at another time alters this opposition to one of 
 "spirit" and i/'v^^, "soul." He differs from Plato normally in 
 regarding the "spirit" as a power introduced into man from above 
 rather than as an integral part of man; yet again he becomes 
 Platonic when he writes of the man's self, his ego, torn between 
 these two contending powers, as neither "spirit" alone nor "soul" 
 (or "flesh") alone, but somehow as both of these at once. At the 
 end of our period the same ambiguity will be found in Chrysos- 
 tom. I cannot see that the modern study of psychology has 
 brought us one whit nearer to the elucidation of this mystery. 
 We are one, and we are two; and this is all that dualism ven- 
 tures to pronounce. 
 
56 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 the body and the contacts with phenomena, while 
 at other times we are more conscious of a division 
 of our being which opens down into the depths 
 of personahty. But withal the "philosophy of 
 the soul" is to strive to behold it in its purer es- 
 sence, stripped and cleansed of its muddy vest- 
 ments, however these may be conceived. That 
 is justice, when by a complete self-knowledge a 
 man has become master of himself (or "better 
 than himself," kreitton hautou, as the phrase runs 
 with a significant and beautiful ambiguity) ; that 
 is happiness, eudaimonia, when there is no longer 
 a hostile division of the powers within the soul, 
 like to faction within a city, but a measured har- 
 mony and the unity of subordination. 
 
 The next step in Plato's religion, the question 
 of the soul's immortality, carries us to the border- 
 land between philosophy and theology ; for in the 
 Greek Tradition, from the beginning to the end, 
 life beyond the grave was closely associated with 
 the being and nature of deity. In Homeric times 
 the chief distinction between gods and men was 
 that the former lived forever in a light where the 
 shadow of death did not fall, whereas the human 
 soul, after its brief appearance on earth, passed 
 to a region of gloom, where, if it could be said 
 to exist at all, it was as an insubstantial wraith, 
 like the images that flit through our minds in the 
 dreams of sleep. And in later days, among 
 
JUSTICE AND THE SOUL 57 
 
 pagan and Christian alike, to say that the soul 
 survived in the full enjoyment of its powers was 
 equivalent to calling it divine; to be endowed 
 with immortality and to be deified were almost 
 synonymous terms/'' It is therefore quite in the 
 order of Greek thought that one of Plato's most 
 elaborate arguments for the duration of the soul 
 as the ultimate source of motion should have been 
 directed to prove the being of God." In discuss- 
 ing the question of immortality we are still in the 
 province of philosophy in so far as the appeal is 
 to the soul's knowledge of itself. But the evi- 
 dence is of another sort ; like the evidence for the 
 existence of the gods, it is less immediate and 
 positive, more dependent on the colder conclu- 
 sions of reason, than in the case of the great 
 ethical thesis of The Republic. 
 
 There are three main demonstrations of im- 
 mortality in the Dialogues. One of these is the 
 aforesaid argument of the Laws for the soul and 
 for God as self -moving entities and so logically 
 and temporally antecedent to the chain of me- 
 chanical motion. Here the future existence of 
 the soul, its immortality in the common meaning 
 
 15 So Lucian, quoting Heraclitus, says (Vitarum Audio 14): 
 Tt 8ai 01 avOpoiTTOL ; @tol dvrjroi. Ti' 8ai ol 6f.oC ; "AvOpoiiTOL 
 addvaTOi. And Clement, in his sermon Quis Dives Salvetur 19, 
 speaks of spiritual wealth as ^eoiroiov koi ^w^s x°PVy°^ alwvLOv. 
 
 16 See post in the translation of Laws x. 
 
58 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 of the word, is left to be implied from its prenatal 
 24Sc fit. eternity, but in the Phaedrus the same argument 
 from the soul's faculty of self-motion is extended 
 explicitly in both directions. All that we call 
 soul, it is there said, is immortal, since it contains 
 within itself the principle of continuity. That 
 which moves another and is itself moved by an- 
 other will have rest from life as it has rest from 
 motion; but that which is self -moved, as it has 
 no reason to abandon itself, ceases not to move, 
 and is the source and principle of motion for all 
 other things that move. Such a source and prin- 
 ciple is without beginning, itself the beginning of 
 all things that come to be. For if it began, that 
 from which it began would be the source and 
 principle. And as it is without beginning, so it 
 must be without end; since if the source failed, 
 there would be nothing from which it or anything 
 else should come into being, and all would be 
 nothing. Neither therefore can it perish nor 
 come into being, or all the world would come to 
 a standstill and fall together, having no source 
 of motion or existence. All material bodies that 
 have their motion from without are lifeless, that is 
 to say soulless; all that have their motion from 
 within and from themselves are possessed of a 
 living soul. So it is we say that soul, and soul 
 alone, is without beginning or end, without birth 
 or death. 
 
JUSTICE AND THE SOUL 59 
 
 This may be called the first demonstration; the 
 second, given in the tenth book of The Republic, 
 is closely akin to it. Everything in nature per- 
 ishes by its own evil, not by the evil that pertains 
 to something else. Thus, if a man's body per- 
 ishes, it does so by reason of its ovi^n disease. The 
 disease may have been brought on by corrupt 
 food, but the corruption of the food is nothing 
 to us unless there is some weakness in the body 
 itself which lays it open to infection. The vice 
 or evil inherent in each thing, and that alone, is 
 the true cause of its destruction; and if anything 
 can be found which shows corruption yet is not 
 dissolved or destroyed by that corruption, such a 
 nature will be exempt from dissolution and death. 
 But just this is found to be true of the soul. Its 
 evil, Hke its good, is its own, a moral attribute 
 rooted in its self-motion, and distinct from evil in 
 any other form. And moral evil has this pecul- 
 iarity, that it does not, as does the body's evil to 
 the body, waste or destroy that in which it occurs. 
 So far from consuming the soul, injustice and the 
 other vices seem often to increase its activity, 
 just as the nature of all desire is to expand in- 
 definitely. Hence we argue that the soul, as it 
 does not perish by its own evil, is not mortal, like 
 all things material, but lives forever. 
 
 The third demonstration is that which occu- 
 pied the minds of the little Socratic band during 
 
 608d ff. 
 
60 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 the last memorable day in gaol, as recorded in the 
 Phaedo. The arguments put into the mouth of 
 Socrates, and probably reproducing in the main 
 his actual conversation (though Plato admits that 
 he himself, owing to illness, was not present) , are 
 too long to be considered here in detail. Briefly, 
 however, we may observe that they follow three 
 lines, which may be designated as the physical, 
 the Ideal, and the metaphysical. 
 
 The first of these applies to the soul the theory 
 which in physical science is known as the conser- 
 vation of energy. It proceeds much as does the 
 argument from motion in the Phaedrus. As 
 there is change in material phenomena, one thing 
 passing into another or one state into another, 
 but with no loss or accretion to the sum of exist- 
 ing energy; so in psychical phenomena life 
 springs from death and death from life with end- 
 less alternation. If this were not so, and that 
 which died did not return to life, or that which 
 was born did not suffer death, then the sum of 
 life would soon be exhausted or would be ex- 
 tended beyond measure, instead of remaining a 
 fixed quantity. Hence life and death are only 
 alternations in the continuity of soul. As for the 
 third, the metaphysical argument, it is of the 
 same nature and has about the same exasperat- 
 ing elusiveness as the ontological proof of the 
 existence of God. If you define God as being, 
 
JUSTICE AND THE SOUL 61 
 
 then God must be; so, if you define soul as life, 
 then it must live, and as soul cannot perish. 
 There is in fact not much satisfaction in either 
 the physical or the metaphysical form of demon- 
 stration. So far as they have any validity, they 
 merely prove the continued existence in the world 
 of something which we may agree to call soul, 
 while of the nature of that entity, or of your im- 
 mortality or of mine in any sense of the word 
 worthy of discussion, they say nothing. 
 
 But the argument from Ideas, which forms 
 the heart and centre of the whole dialogue, is not 
 to be thus lightly dismissed. This has a validity 
 of another sort, a source of conviction which Hes 
 deeper than the logic of words, and which has set 
 the Phaedo by the side of the Bible as one of the 
 indispensable and inexhaustible documents of our 
 religion. 
 
 Talking with his friends under the shadow of 
 death which will descend upon him with the set- 
 ting of the sun, talking while the sunlight is still 
 upon the hills, Socrates asks if they are not aware 
 of two lives that divide their interest : one the life 
 involved in the urgent needs of the body, a net- 
 work of desires which can never be really satis- 
 fied, reaching after pleasures inextricably bound 
 up with pain and leaving the heart uneasy 
 whether fulfilled or unfulfilled, brief and ephem- 
 
62 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 eral at best," at the worst terrible and devastat- 
 ing ; the other hf e turned to the thought of eternal 
 values, under whose impulsion we cease to de- 
 mand the satisfaction of beauty from things 
 which are forever clouded with uncertainty and 
 may even conceal temptations to embrace ugli- 
 ness, or to demand the satisfaction of righteous- 
 ness from deeds which can never be judged apart 
 from the perplexity of consequences, and set our 
 heart on those spiritual laws — or powers, let us 
 say — which are the source of attraction in what- 
 ever appears beautiful and the impelling motive 
 in whatever is done for righteousness' sake, and 
 which we think we might see in themselves as 
 radiant entities, somewhere and somehow, with 
 other eyes than those of the body, if only we 
 could escape from the hmitations and hindrances 
 of mortality. This is the great bargain of phi- 
 losophy, the exchange of the desire towards what 
 is ephemeral and subject to mutation for the 
 hope, to be perfectly fulfilled in some other exist- 
 ence, of what is deathless and immutable. The 
 hope is within the choice of any man, and if the 
 hope is earnest it soon, by a process which can be 
 verified in experience, passes into a certainty of 
 belief. 
 
 17 This becomes the traditional ground of rejecting pleasure 
 as a "good." So Maximus Tyrius xxxi, 1b: Ovtoj? kol tov ayadov 
 €1 Tis a<j>(\oi Tr)v dxpt'^eiav Koi rrjv (TTacriv, <rvva<^eTA£V avrov Kat 
 Tr]v ffivcnv. 
 
JUSTICE AND THE SOUL 63 
 
 Hence philosophy is a kind of study of death, 
 not in a morbid or rebelhous sense, though to 
 Socrates, now waiting for the fateful summons, 
 some unusual emphasis of asceticism may be al- 
 lowed, but as a preparation for the departure 
 some day in peace and good cheer. Rather, we 
 might say that philosophy is not so much a study 
 of death as of deathlessness, and a search for the 
 signs of eternity in the objects of time. And 
 what then if it should happen to any man in that 
 search to get glimpses of beauty itself or of right- 
 eousness itself, pure, untainted, unmixed, not as 
 we know them by symbols and tokens in the flesh 
 and in the petty paraphernalia of mortality, but 
 in the singleness of their divine nature? Should 
 you call it a mean condition to keep the eye of the 
 soul raised to that vision and to live in communion 
 with it? If you reflect, you will say that such a 
 man will bring forth no illusory images of virtue 
 but the realities of righteousness, as is meet for 
 one who has wedded himself to the very truth; 
 and his immortality will not be that of those who 
 seek to prolong a kind of vicarious existence in 
 the generations of their children, nor the mere 
 hope of some future state of blessedness, but the 
 present possession of one who has grown like and 
 dear to God.^^ The hope and the present assur- 
 
 18 The argument is reproduced for Christians by Origen in his 
 Exhortatio ad Martyrium 47 : *Eti 8e koL <f>iXo^o}€i avOpwrros, ttci- 
 
64 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 ance are possible, Socrates would argue, because 
 there is that within us which is akin to the eternal 
 world of Ideas as there is that within us which 
 binds us to the phenomenal or material world." 
 Such is the central argument of the Pliaedo, 
 continued and confirmed in the Symposimn. Un- 
 happily, in this inadequate summary, it is de- 
 spoiled of its magnificent art of persuasion; but 
 even in its fulness, and presented with all Plato's 
 imaginative eloquence, one must admit that it 
 still lacks the finality of logical demonstration. 
 One can hear the doubter retort that by the same 
 procedure any proposition, whether true or false, 
 can be established. It is a fact, he will say, that, 
 if you deliberately fix your mind on those so- 
 called Ideas, they will become more and more 
 real to you imtil you have an unalterable convic- 
 tion of their existence as independent and eternal 
 entities, and an equally unalterable conviction of 
 something within yourself akin to the immortal 
 nature attributed to them. But this is merely to 
 
 (T/xa Xa^hiv TTipX ovortas XoytK^s "A^X^^' ^"^ ^X°^'^V'^ """' o"vyyev£S dtw, 
 voipa yap (KaTepa koL aopara, Kal is 6 iTrtKpaToiv aTrooeiKvvcrL 
 Xdyos, aawfiara. Tt Se Kal 6 KaracrKevd^wv r]p.a<i IvtiroUi iroOov t^s 
 Trpos avTov cvcre/^etas xaX Kotvcovt'as, oo-tis Kal ev TOis i(r<f>a\p.evoLS 
 ivvr; Tiva aw^€L tov OtLOv ftov\rjiJ.aTo<;, tiirtp p.r} rjv Bvvarov to 
 (f)V(TLKw<; TTodovixtvov TOIS AoyiKoTs KaTaXafiuv ; Kal (rac^cs, OTt 
 wcTTre/) CKttCTTOV /xe'Aos ly/xiov tt/jos Tt iri(j>vK€v oiKCLOTrjTa o^w^eiv, ot 
 6(f>da\fxol TTjOos TO. opara Kal wra tt/dos Ta aKOUO-Ta, ovtw vovs tt^os 
 TO. voyjTa Kal tov eireKtiva twv vor]TU)V 6e6v. 
 19 For a full discussion of Ideas see Platonism, chapter vi. 
 
JUSTICE AND THE SOUL 65 
 
 grant that the mind works in a certain way; it 
 manifestly does not prove that the behef so con- 
 firmed is true. You have only to dwell on any 
 other proposition, and it will gradually permeate 
 your thoughts until it will seem to you that no 
 other mode of thinking is possible. 
 
 So much the Platonist as a dialectician will con- 
 cede, is indeed obliged to concede; but he will 
 maintain that, although conviction is not proof, 
 the consequences following upon conviction may 
 afford a kind of demonstration which a wise man 
 will not disregard. Set your thoughts to move 
 forward on one path, and you may arrive at con- 
 viction indeed, but with that conviction will come 
 confusion of mind and distraction of motives and 
 loss of that assured peace which is the end of all 
 striving and seeking; and this will happen be- 
 cause your thoughts are not in harmony with the 
 realities which are not yours to create and over 
 which you have no control. Whereas by moving 
 forward on the contrary path you will grow in 
 inner strength and happiness, for the reason that 
 you are adapting your belief to spiritual realities. 
 Thus it is with Ideas and immortahty; the 
 demonstration of their truth lies in the conse- 
 quence of beheving. So far as life is concerned 
 the test of such matters is a pragmatic inference \/ 
 from experience.^" 
 
 20 See Appendix B. 
 
29a 
 40c 
 
 66 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 In other words, the argument for immortality 
 belongs to philosophy, but lies on the verge of 
 that further province of religion which is con- 
 cerned with the existence and nature of God. 
 Socrates, in the Apology, was speaking strictly as 
 a philosopher when he avowed that no man knows 
 certainly whether death is the end of all or a mi- 
 gration from life to life, and when, with this con- 
 cession to scepticism, he uttered his unfaltering 
 41c affirmation that we "ought to be of good hope 
 towards death, being persuaded of this one ti*uth 
 at least, that no evil can befall a good man either 
 in life or in death." I think that Socrates, I am 
 sure that Plato, did not really doubt the immor- 
 tality of the soul, any more than they doubted 
 the existence of God ; but they knew that neither 
 of these beliefs was absolutely essential to the 
 truth of philosophy. Socrates was speaking still 
 as a philosopher, but with his face turned to a 
 diviner light, when in the same Apology he dwelt 
 with loving faith on the joys to which he looked 
 forward in a life untroubled by the evils of human 
 injustice, and when, in the Phaedo, he comforted 
 his friends with argument after argument to show 
 that his faith was not irrational but confirmed 
 by all the wisdom of experience. 
 
 To these argimients he added a picture of what 
 might be supposed to happen to the souls of the 
 blessed in their future life, painting it with the 
 
Phaedo 114d 
 
 JUSTICE AND THE SOUL 67 
 
 brightest colours of the imagination, that it might 
 be remembered by his disciples and work upon 
 their minds as an "incantation" against the at- 
 tacks of incredulity. But a more powerful charm 
 than any he could weave in words was the exam- 
 ple of his own faith. It is not without design that 
 Plato has joined together in one dialogue the most 
 elaborate of his (or Socrates') logical demonstra- 
 tions of the immortal nature of the soul and the 
 minute account of Socrates' conversion to the 
 Ideal philosophy and of his victorious death. It 
 is as if Plato had said : Dispute if you will these 
 arguments of Socrates for the soul's eternity, 
 since in sooth they cannot be made logic-proof; 
 but look at the man himself, and, at the worst, no 
 reasoning will be strong enough to persuade you 
 that such a life was based on a delusion. Nor is 
 there any inconsistency in the fact that imme- 
 diatety after pronouncing his "incantation" Soc- 
 rates closed the conversation with a warning to 
 his disciples against the mere acquiescence in 
 authority, and with a command to reason these Phaedo hsb 
 matters out for themselves in the light vouch- 
 safed to them by their own souls, for, as Hesiod 
 had written, "He is a good man who hearkens to 
 counsel well spoken, but he is the best who thinks 
 out all things for himself. "^^ 
 
 21 Works and Days 293. — One is reminded of the last words of 
 Buddha, which contain a similar command, based on a complex 
 
68 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 The reality of Plato's belief in the immortality 
 of the soul is open to no cavil ; but the mischievous 
 curiosity (periergia) , as Plato would have called 
 it, of the German mind has raised a question of 
 a sort virtually to nullify that belief while pre- 
 tending to render it grilndlich. It was Hegel 
 who started the trouble — Hegel, the fountain- 
 head, one is boimd to say, of a stream of meta- 
 physics that has swamped with its muddy waters 
 almost all the German and British Platonists of 
 the nineteenth century. For the ease of my soul 
 I borrow this statement of the case from one of 
 the latest of the English Hegelianizers. In the 
 Introduction to his edition of the Phaedo Mr. 
 Archer-Hind observes : 
 
 "Hegel, analysing the conception of immor- 
 tality, seizes at once upon that which he regards as 
 essential to the Platonic philosophy: this kernel 
 he instantly drags to light, rejecting the husk of 
 Vorstellung. Whether an individual conscious- 
 ness shall continue to exist as such is to Platonism 
 of no metaphysical importance whatever : what is 
 of importance is to grasp the true nature of eter- 
 nity. The soul's real immortality lies in the oper- 
 ation of thought: eternity is in the nature of 
 thought and has nothing to do with duration." 
 
 of scepticism and affirmation seemingly so different from that of 
 Socrates, yet more like than difiPerent if rightly understood: "And 
 now, O priests, I take my leave of you; all the constituents of 
 being are transitory; work out your salvation with diligence" 
 (Warren, Buddhism in Translations 109). 
 
JUSTICE AND THE SOUL 69 
 
 From Hegel our British editor passes to Teich- 
 miiller, who, as he says, "goes further, and de- 
 clares that Plato could not maintain individual 
 immortality without grave inconsistency; from 
 which premise he most justly draws the conclu- 
 sion that Plato did not maintain it." Mr. Archer- 
 Hind's o^vn position is in accord with Hegel's in 
 so far as he holds with Hegel that "the duration 
 of the individual is of no metaphysical import- 
 ance [metaphysics, however, is of supreme im- 
 portance to the Hegehan] : . . . Plato's philosophy 
 in no way involves it." He further agrees with 
 Teichmiiller in holding "that any interpretation 
 of Plato which attributes inconsistency to him 
 stands self-condemned" ; but he softens this asser- 
 tion by adding that Plato's thought, though fun- 
 damentally consistent, shows a regular develop- 
 ment: in the Ti7naeus, which expresses Plato's 
 mature views, "personal immortality does more 
 or less [he means decidedly more] recede into 
 the region of the mythical: it enters only in an 
 extremely allegorical guise"; but in the Phaedo, 
 he is willing to admit, "although Plato knew very 
 well that neither he nor any one else could de- 
 monstrate the immortality of individual souls, 
 yet he was strongly disposed to believe, at least 
 at the time the Phaedo was written, that every 
 soul on its separation from the body will not be 
 reabsorbed in the universal, but will survive as 
 
70 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 a conscious personality, even as it existed before 
 its present incarnation." Now of the pantheism 
 and metaphysical monism which Mr. Archer- 
 Hind discovers in the Timaeus it will be time to 
 speak in a later chapter; here we may venture 
 the assertion that they rest on a mistaken notion 
 of Plato's use of mythology. For the concession 
 in regard to the Phaedo let us be grateful; it is 
 not often that your metaphysician, indurated in 
 this school, grants anything to the pleas of hu- 
 manity and common-sense. And in return we 
 also can make a concession ; the physical and the 
 metaphysical arguments of the Phaedo, if taken 
 without the Ideal argument, might leave the door 
 open to a pseudo-transcendental interpretation; 
 they turn on an ontological conception of soul in 
 the abstract and have only an indirect bearing on 
 the question of personal endurance. But to leave 
 out the Ideal argmnent is simply to leave out 
 Plato. 
 
 For us this over-wise grasping at the meta- 
 physical discursions in Plato's system seems to 
 begin with Hegel, but in fact it goes back to the 
 Neoplatonists, from whom it came to the German 
 transcendentahsts through Boehme, perhaps, and 
 other mystical enthusiasts of the sort. The source 
 of the error may be found in such a passage as 
 this from the opening of the fourth book of the 
 fourth Ennead of Plotinus: 
 
JUSTICE AND THE SOUL 71 
 
 "Wliat then will the soul say, and of what 
 things will it have memory, in the world of reason 
 and when it has its Hfe in pure being? We are 
 obliged to say that it contemplates those things 
 and has its activity in those things wherein it has 
 its being; otherwise it would not be there. How 
 then of the things of its life in this world, as that 
 it was devoted to philosophy, and that even while 
 here it was looking to that other world, — will it 
 remember none of these? No. For if, when one 
 is engaged in the act of pure reason, it is impos- 
 sible to have any other activity than that of rea- 
 son and contemplation and in this act of reason 
 there is included no reflection on one's self as hav- 
 ing reasoned, but such reflection would come 
 later, if it came at all, and would appertain to 
 one who had already passed from that activity of 
 pure reason, — if this be true, as it is true, then 
 when we are wholly in the world of pure reason, 
 we have no memory of the things that happened 
 to us here, whatever our life may have been. And 
 if, as we suppose, pure reason is all timeless, since 
 the things of that world are in eternity but not 
 in time, it is impossible that there should be 
 memory there of anything whatsoever, much less 
 of the things of this world." 
 
 Now, however this sort of transcendentahsm 
 may have imped itself out in Platonic feathers, 
 and however possible it may be to gather hints 
 from Plato of some ultimate restoration of the 
 
72 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 soul to a timeless eternity, such abstractions have 
 no place in his highly concrete thoughts of im- 
 mortality, nor indeed, one may make bold to say, 
 in any thoughts of immortality that have meaning 
 for a human soul. Instead of looking forward to 
 a future life of empty contemplation divested of 
 memory, Plato regards memory as one of the chief 
 proofs of immortality; instead of idealizing a 
 state of being without self-consciousness, the 
 highest aim of his philosophy is that a man should 
 come to know himself. To say that "Plato's 
 philosophy in no way involves the duration of the 
 individual" is to turn page after page of his writ- 
 ings into mere trifling. Was Socrates saying 
 something that had no connexion with his gen- 
 uine belief and Plato's, and was he jesting, 
 when at the end of his Apology he spoke of meet- 
 ing the illustrious dead in the world to which he 
 was going and of conversing with them? I think 
 he meant his words to be taken as simply as any 
 Christian's faith is to be taken. Did Plato write 
 
 63c with tongue in his cheek when in the Phaedo he 
 reports the hope of Socrates — or rather the one 
 thing of which he has no doubt — that his soul is 
 about to pass into the presence of gods who shall 
 judge not as men do, but justly and righteously? 
 
 498D And in The Republic was he mocking us, when 
 he makes Socrates encourage his young friends at 
 one of the critical points of their debate by bid- 
 
JUSTICE AND THE SOUL 1^ 
 
 ding them remember that, though the scoffer may 
 remain unconvinced, they will at least be prepar- 
 ing their own souls against the time when in some 
 other world they may come together once more 
 and argue over these same matters ?" 
 
 No, the attempt to banish personal immor- 
 tahty from Plato's religion is of a piece with the 
 rejection of personality from his conception of 
 God; it follows the effort to inject a Neoplatonic 
 and Teutonic metaphysic into his philosophy, or, 
 when all concessions are made, to lay a completely 
 false stress on the hints of such a metaphysic 
 scattered here and there in the wide circle of his 
 speculation. There can be no right imderstand- 
 ing of Platonism until the mind has been swept 
 clean of this whole metaphysical obsession. 
 
 The highest reach of Plato's philosophy, con- 
 fining the word to what may be called the human 
 element of religion, we have found in the 
 Phaedrus and the Symposium, the Phaedo and 
 The Republic; for his theology we turn now to 
 the discourse on God and Providence inserted in 
 the Laws as a kind of general preamble. Tak- 
 ing the word philosophy in the larger sense as 
 an equivalent for the whole circle of religion, we 
 
 " Eis fKctvov Tov /3tov, orav av^ts yevo/nevoi tois Totoi;Totf 
 €VTv;(w/u,£v Aoyots. So, with a pretty change of ivTv)(Wfji.€v for 
 €vTvx*^<^h James Adam dedicates his noble edition of The Re- 
 public to the memory of a friend. 
 
74 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 may close this chapter with the words of Atticus, 
 one of the soundest of the later Platonizers: "If 
 the soul is not immortal, then there is no remin- 
 iscence [from antenatal association with Ideas]. 
 If there is no reminiscence, then there is no acqui- 
 sition of knowledge. Therefore, as all the dog- 
 mas of Plato really hang and depend on the di- 
 vine nature and immortality of the soul, he who 
 rejects this truth overthrows the entire fabric 
 of Plato's philosophy.'"' 
 
 ^^ Et 8e fJLTi icTTiv rj il/v^r] dOdvaro^, ov8k dvdfxvr](n<; . el St fii] 
 TOVTO, ouSc ixd6rj(Tts. TrdvTwv ovv twv nXaTcovos Soy/xarajv 
 dT€;^va)S i^-qprrj/xevoiv kol iKKpefxafxeviDv t^s Kara ttjv ^v)(r]v deor- 
 r]r6<; re Koi d^avacriaj, 6 fxrj a-vy)(^u)po)v tovto ttjv Tracrav dvaTpiiru 
 <f>iXo(TO<f}Lav nXciTcovos {Apud Eusebius, Praep. Ev. XV, ix, 5). 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 THEOLOGY 
 TRANSLATION FROM THE LAWS, BOOK X 
 
 [The tenth book of the Laws, virtually the 
 whole of which follows in translation, is inserted 
 by Plato as a preamble to the particular statutes 
 regarding impiety. It really forms an independ- 
 ent treatise of theology, put into the mouth of 
 an unnamed Athenian who is conversing with a 
 Lacedaemonian and a Cretan friend. To some 
 scholars the theses here presented seem a deroga- 
 tion from Plato's purer philosophy, even a senile 
 concession to popular superstition; to others, in- 
 cluding myself, they seem indispensable to a 
 rounded view of Plato's religion. I take this oc- 
 casion to call attention to Tayler Lewis's edition 
 and interpretation of this book in his Plato 
 Against the Atheists, an admirable but now, I 
 fear, little known example of the older American 
 scholarship.] 
 
 No one who believes in the gods as law and sssb 
 custom ordain has ever voluntarily done an im- 
 pious deed or uttered a lawless word. If he 
 has done so it is for one of three reasons: either 
 he does not beheve in the existence of the gods, 
 
 75 
 
76 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 as I said, or, secondly, he believes that they exist 
 but have no care for men, or, thirdly, that they 
 are placable and can be turned from their course 
 by sacrifices and prayers. 
 
 Now I can imagine such men girding at us and 
 saying: "You gentlemen of Athens and Lacedae- 
 mon and Crete speak the truth. Some of us deny 
 the very existence of the gods, whilst others of us 
 believe about them as you say. And we hold 
 that before you begin your harsh threatening 
 you should try to persuade and teach us, on good 
 evidence, that the gods exist and that they are 
 too good to be diverted by gifts and charms from 
 their course of justice. For now, hearing such 
 and suchlike accounts of them from highly ac- 
 credited poets and orators and prophets and 
 priests and others without number, most of us 
 have no incentive to abandon our evil practices, 
 but sin and then look for healing. From law- 
 givers^ who pretend to be humane rather than 
 severe we demand first that you should use some 
 persuasion with us, speaking at least with more 
 conviction of truth than other men even if you 
 
 1 Two things should be remembered in connexion with this word. 
 In many of the Greek city-states the Constitution was the work 
 of some actual or mythical reformer of the government, so that 
 "lawgiver" for Plato's readers would be a synonym for the 
 very principle of law and custom. And, secondly, the three inter- 
 locutors of this dialogue are discussing the Constitution to be 
 provided for a city which is to be newly founded in Crete, 
 
THE LAWS, BOOK X 77 
 
 cannot discourse more eloquently concerning the 
 existence of the gods; and so perhaps we might 
 believe you. Try then, if what we say is reason- 
 able, to meet our challenge." 
 
 Now it may seem an easy matter to express the 
 simple truth that the gods exist. First there are ^se 
 the earth and the sun, the stars and the universe, 
 and this beautiful arrangement of the seasons 
 by the division of years and months ; and there is 
 the fact that all Greeks and barbarians believe 
 in the existence of the gods. Yet I am afraid 
 that evil-minded men — I would never say I am 
 ashamed — will rather despise us. For you do 
 not understand the cause of their quarrel with us, 
 but imagine that their souls are driven to a life 
 of impiety by nothing but the intemperance of 
 pleasures and desires. You quite overlook an- 
 other cause, — it has escaped your notice on ac- 
 count of your remote position, — and that is a 
 certain ingrained state of ignorance which pre- 
 sents itself as the highest wisdom. There are 
 writings among us Athenians concerning the 
 gods, such as I vmderstand are not found among 
 you of Lacedaemon and Crete owing to the ex- 
 cellence of your Constitution, some in metre, 
 some in prose, the most ancient of which deal 
 with the origin of the heavens and the world in 
 general ; and from this they proceed forthwith to 
 describe the birth of the gods and their behaviour 
 
78 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 when born. Now, however such writings may- 
 benefit or harm the reader in other respects, their 
 very antiquity makes it no Hght matter to cen- 
 sm-e them; I can only say that, so far as they 
 have any influence on the service and honour due 
 to parents, I have never found anything useful 
 or even in the least degree truthful to commend 
 in them. Well, these tales of ancient things we 
 may pass over without comment; I am ready to 
 hear of them whatever will please the gods. Our 
 business is to hold the writings of our wise mod- 
 erns to account for whatever evils they may have 
 caused. The works of such writers have this ef- 
 fect : when you and I mention the evidence for the 
 existence of the gods, bringing forward the sun 
 and moon, and the stars and earth, as being gods 
 and godlike, our youths, who have hearkened to 
 these wise men, declare that such objects are no 
 more than earth and stones with no power to 
 heed the doings of mankind. . . . 
 887c To the point then. How shall we argue for 
 
 the existence of the gods without indignation? 
 For there is a certain compulsion upon us to be 
 outraged and to hate those who have been and 
 are the occasion of this discussion, by their in- 
 credulous rejection of the myths which as young 
 children and nurslings they heard from their 
 mothers and nurses, — heard them indeed recited 
 in sportive songs and serious chants, and in 
 
THE LAWS, BOOK X 79 
 
 prayers that accompany the sacrifice, and at the 
 same time beheld such sights as a child delights 
 in seeing and hearing, when his parents are at the 
 altar and are most earnestly concerned for them- 
 selves and their children, addressing themselves 
 to the gods in prayer and petition as if the gods 
 certainly existed. So too these sceptics see and 
 hear all men, Greeks and barbarians, in all times 
 of calamity and good fortune, making protesta- 
 tions and supplications at the rising and the set- 
 ting of the sun and the moon, not as if there were 
 no gods but as if they surely were, and without 
 the shghtest suspicion to the contrary. When we 
 are obliged to talk with men who show contempt 
 for these signs, with no pretense of argument, as 
 any one must admit who has the least spark of 
 reason in him, it may be hard to find gentle words 
 for our admonition and instruction in the ele- 
 mentary truth that the gods exist. Yet some- 
 how we must make the venture; for it is a sad 
 state of affairs if half of mankind is to be mad 
 with the frenzy of pleasure, and the other half 
 with indignation at them. So then let the prelude 
 to our argument be free of anger against those 
 who are thus perverted in their understanding, 
 and let us say gently, quenching our indignation, 
 as if we were here conversing with one of these 
 men: ^ 
 
 My son, you are young, and advancing age will 
 
80 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 cause you to change many of your present opin- 
 ions for quite contrary views. Wait then until 
 such a time before you set yourself up as judge 
 in matters of the greatest moment ; and the great- 
 est matter of all is what you now take so lightly, 
 viz. how the good or ill of a man's life depends 
 on his right conception of the gods. And first I 
 can tell you one great fact concerning them with- 
 out fear of contradiction; it is this: you are not 
 alone in your view of the gods, neither have you 
 and your friends invented it, but there has been 
 always a greater or less number of men who suf- 
 fer from this disease. I myself have known many 
 such, and I can say this to you, that not one of 
 those who imbibed in youth a disbelief in the ex- 
 istence of the gods has ever persisted in this 
 opinion to his old age.^ The two states of mind 
 regarding the gods that do persist — not indeed 
 with many, but they do persist with some — are 
 these : that the gods exist but have no care for hu- 
 man affairs, and, what may follow, that they care 
 but are easily placated by sacrifice and prayer. 
 
 2 How is this statement to be reconciled witli the words of 
 891b, to the effect that the arguments of atheism are scattered 
 broadcast? Does Plato mean that philosophers of mature years 
 are not sincere in their rejection of the gods? Or does this 
 passage refer to laymen, while atheistic philosophers form a 
 small class by themselves, whose practical influence is limited to the 
 young? And even the philosophers, e.g. the forerunners of Epi- 
 curus, admitted the existence of the gods, though practically they 
 were atheists. 
 
THE LAWS, BOOK X 81 
 
 If you hearken to me, you will wait until your 
 opinion concerning them has grown as clear as 
 may be, considering the while whether the matter 
 stands thus or otherwise, and making inquiry of 
 others and more particularly of the lawgiver. 
 In the intervening time you had better not ven- 
 ture upon any impiety towards the gods; cer- 
 tainly he who makes the laws for you will do his 
 best, now and in the future, to teach the truth of 
 these things. 
 
 This brings me to say that without foreseeing 
 it we have been led on to consider a remarkable 
 theory, what is regarded by many as the wisest 
 of all theories. There are men who avow that 
 all things, present, past, and future, come to 
 pass by nature, or by art, or through chance. 
 It may be assumed that wise men know what 
 they are talking about; yet I propose to follow 
 them up and examine the views of their party. 889 
 These hold that the greatest and fairest works 
 appear to be of nature and chance, whereas the 
 lesser works are of art [i.e. design], which, re- 
 ceiving the creation of the great and primary 
 works from nature, forms and fashions all those 
 lesser things which are commonly called artificial. 
 To speak more plainly : fire and water and earth 
 and air, they say, all have their being by nature 
 and by chance, and none of them by art \_i.e. de- 
 sign] , while the bodies next after these, as we see 
 
82 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 them in the earth and sun and moon and stars, 
 have come into being through the action of these 
 elements, which are altogether without soul. The 
 elements, moving each with the chance of energy 
 in it, by a kind of affinity as they fall together, 
 warm with cold or dry with moist and soft with 
 hard, and all the other inevitable mixtures of op- 
 posites blended by chance, have thus and in this 
 manner created the whole heavens and every 
 thing in the heavens, as well as all animals and 
 plants; whence also are the various seasons. 
 There is no mind at work in this, nor any god, 
 nor art, but, as I say, it all happens by nature and 
 chance. Art, they maintain, is altogether a pos- 
 terior production from these, and, mortal itself 
 and of mortal birth, at a later date has brought 
 forth certain toys of creation, which have little 
 substance of truth but are rather idols or insub- 
 stantial forms, of mortal kinship, such as are pro- 
 duced by painting and music and the other arts 
 of this class. If there are arts that produce any- 
 thing serious, they are such as medicine and hus- 
 bandry and gymnastics, which associate their 
 power with nature. As for statecraft, they say 
 that only a small part of it has any association 
 with nature, but that for the most part it belongs 
 to art; wherefore law-making as a whole is not of 
 nature but of art, whose statutes lack veracity. 
 Hence these men begin with the statement that 
 
THE LAWS, BOOK X 83 
 
 the gods exist by art, not by nature but as a 
 product of laws which vary in various localities 
 as men happen to come to agreement in their 
 lawmaking. Furthermore, one class of objects 
 is beautiful by nature and another class by law. 
 As for the justice so-called of things, it has noth- 
 ing at all to do with nature, but men are always 
 in dispute with one another about it and changing 
 their views; and as their view happens to be at 
 any time they make this their criterion of justice, 
 which is thus a product of art and of the laws with 
 no basis in the nature of things. 
 
 These, my friends, are the opinions current 
 everywhere among our youth, formulated by wise 
 men who declare that the ideal of justice is that 
 which any one can make to prevail by force. 
 Whence impiety and irreligion lay hold of our 
 youth, as if there were no gods such as the law 
 prescribes and we ought to believe. Whence 
 also factions arise, instigated by those who draw 
 men to a life supposed to be right according to 
 nature, which is in truth to live by dominating 
 others and not by subordinating one's self to 
 others in accordance with law.^ 
 
 3 One may recall the warning words of Bishop Butler (Preface 
 to Sermons) : "A late author [Wollaston] of great and deserved 
 reputation says, that to place virtue in following nature, is at 
 best a loose way of talk. And he has reason to say this, if what 
 I think he intends to express, though with great decency, be true, 
 that scarce any other sense can be put upon these words, but act- 
 
 890 
 
84 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 What then, under these long-standing condi- 
 tions, ought the lawgiver to do? Can he only- 
 stand up in the city and denounce his threats 
 against those who deny the gods or do not think 
 about them as the law prescribes? And so of 
 what is beautiful and just and of all the greatest 
 things and the forces making for virtue and vice, 
 can he only command men to fashion their con- 
 duct and belief in accordance with the written 
 prescriptions of the lawgiver, pronouncing the 
 death penalty against any one who does not show 
 himself amenable to the laws, or punishment by 
 stripes and bonds, or by deprivation of rights, as 
 the case may be, or by poverty and exile? Is 
 there no power of persuasion over men, which 
 he can adapt to his words while uttering the laws, 
 and so temper the wild hearts to some degree? 
 *'^® ... If the arguments of atheism were not scat- 
 tered, so to speak, among all men, there would 
 be no need of our reasoning in defense of the 
 gods' existence ; but now we are obliged to do so. 
 For when the laws of the greatest moment are 
 corrupted by evil men, whose business is it but 
 the lawgiver's to come to their rescue? 
 
 Now when a man expresses such views as we 
 have described, it is a fair inference that he holds 
 fire and water and earth and air to be the first 
 
 ing as any of the several parts, without distinction, of a man's 
 nature happened most to incline him." 
 
THE LAWS, BOOK X 86 
 
 of all things, and calls them by the name of na- 
 ture, regarding the soul as a later production 
 from them. Rather, it is no inference, but this 
 is the unequivocal meaning of his words. And 
 what if we have discovered here the very foun- 
 tain-head of the irrational theorizing in which 
 the students of natural science have ever been 
 indulging!* Examine the whole argument care- 
 fully; for it is no slight matter if these inventors 
 of impious arguments, and leaders of other men, 
 should turn out to be employing no sound but 
 quite erroneous reasoning. My refutation may 
 appear to take an unusual line, but I maintain that 
 these arguments tending to impiety in the soul 
 really invert the order of existence. That which 
 is the primary cause of the generation and cor- 
 ruption of all things, they declare to be not pri- 
 mary but secondary in origin, and what has arisen 
 later they declare to be primary; whence their 
 error in regard to the real being of the gods. All 
 but a very few men seem to be ignorant of the 
 character and power of the soul; and their ig- 
 norance touches not only its other properties but 
 the truth of its generation, that it is among the 
 primary things, having come into being before all 
 
 4 This is precisely the issue today between religion and the 
 Darwinian philosophy of evolution. On a man's answer to the 
 question will depend his tendency towards a spiritual or a ma- 
 terialistic life. 
 
 892 
 
86 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 material bodies, whose every change and commu- 
 tation it certainly controls. And if this is so and 
 soul is more ancient than body, does it not follow 
 inevitably that the properties and affections of 
 soul would antecede those of body? Hence 
 opinion and attention and reason and art and 
 law would be prior to distinctions of hard and 
 soft and heavy and light. So too the great and 
 primary works and actions would belong to soul, 
 just as they are primary, whereas things natural 
 and nature herself, whose very name has a false 
 implication, would be posterior and subject to 
 art and reason. Nature to them signifies genera- 
 tion in the primary instance ; but if soul shall ap- 
 pear to be primary, then neither fire nor air, but 
 soul, being primary in generation, might with a 
 more exquisite propriety be called "natural" by 
 distinction. Such are the conclusions we reach, 
 if we demonstrate that soul is more ancient than 
 body, but not otherwise. . . . 
 
 [The Athenian now proceeds to his demon- 
 stration of the priority of soul. To this end he 
 analyses motion into ten categories. These in- 
 clude, first, the two mechanical motions of a body 
 revolving upon its axis and of a body changing its 
 position; then the six constitutive motions, which 
 affect the parts, or constitution, of a body, viz. 
 combination, dissolution, increase, diminution, 
 generation, corruption; and, finally, two quali- 
 
THE LAWS, BOOK X 87 
 
 tative distinctions, viz. (1) the transmitted mo- 
 tion of a body which moves another and is itself 
 moved by another, and (2) the self -originating 
 motion of a body which moves itself and another. 
 Now it will be seen that the eight mechanical and 
 constitutive forms of motion can be subsumed 
 under the two qualitative categories, and it is 
 clear that all self-originating motion is primary, 
 whereas transmitted motion is secondary. That 
 is to say, so long as one body is moved by an- 
 other, and that by another, we have an endless 
 chain of transmitted motion, without beginning 
 or cause. The cause and beginning must be in 
 self-originating motion, the most ancient and 
 powerful principle of life and change. To this 
 self-originating motion, this principle of life and 
 change, men everywhere give the name of "soul," 
 whereas that which has no original power of mo- 
 tion in itself, but merely transmits motion, is 
 "body," or "matter." Hence soul is prior to 
 body, and body is secondary and later; in the 
 nature of things soul is master and body is 
 servant.] 
 
 We remember our former admission that, if 
 soul shall appear to be more ancient than body, 
 then the properties and affections of soul will be 
 antecedent to those of body. That is to say, char- 
 acter and disposition and will and thought and 
 true opinions and attention and memory will have 
 come into being before length and breadth and 
 
 896c 
 
88 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 depth and strength of bodies, if in fact soul 
 antecedes body. As a consequence we must fur- 
 ther admit that soul is the cause of goodness in 
 things and of evil, of beauty and ughness, justice 
 and injustice, and all the contraries, if we reckon 
 it the cause of all. Then if soul is the indwelling 
 and ordering cause in all things that are in any 
 way moved, must we not say that it orders the 
 heavens also? We must. And shall we say one 
 soul or more than one? I will take the liberty 
 of saying more than one; not less than two at 
 least we must suppose, the one beneficent, the 
 other of contrary efficiency.^ 
 
 5 This is a passage of dubious meaning, reverberations of 
 which will be heard all through the later literature. In it a 
 certain school of Platonists found a text for their theory of two 
 souls in the universe, one good, the other evil. It was taken by 
 Clement of Alexandria in a purely Pauline sense: "That the 
 Devil so frequently mentioned in the barbarian [i.e. Christian] 
 philosophy, the prince of the demons, is an evil-working soul, 
 Plato says expressly in the tenth book of the Laws: 'Then if soul 
 ... of contrary eflBciency.' In like vein he writes in the Phaedrus 
 [240ab] : 'Now there are other evils, but with the most of them 
 some demon has mixed immediate pleasure.' Furthermore in 
 the same tenth book of the Laws he clearly sets forth this senti- 
 ment of the Apostle [Ephes. vi, 12]: 'Our contest is not with 
 flesh and blood, but with the principalities, with the powers, with 
 the things spiritual of those in the heavens'; for his words are 
 as follows [906a] : 'We have already agreed that the heavens 
 are filled with powers of good, many in number, and with con- 
 trary powers, more numerous still than the good; and now we 
 say that we are involved with these in a deathless battle needing 
 a marvellous guard,' " {Stromata V, xiv, 92 f.) Now whatever 
 
THE LAWS, BOOK X 89 
 
 And thus soul draws and leads all things in 
 heaven and on earth and in the sea by its own 
 motions, which we call willing, viewing, attend- 
 ing, considering, opining rightly and wrongly, 
 itself rejoicing or grieving, courageous or fearful, 
 hating or loving. All these and their kind are 
 primary motions which take up the secondary 
 motions of bodies, and so bring all things to in- 
 crease and diminution and dissolution and com- 
 position, and to the consequent properties of 
 warm and cold, heavy and light, hard and soft, 
 white and black, harsh and sweet. And in what- 
 soever soul is engaged, if she takes to herself 
 reason as her godlike helpmate, she guides every- 
 
 Plato meant, he did not mean quite this. As we shall see when 
 we come to the Timaeus, he regarded the soul of man dualistically, 
 as containing in itself the impulses of desire which, in so far 
 as unchecked they tend to endless expansion, are intrinsically 
 evil, and the checking, controlling spirit which effects good out 
 of them. In the phenomenal world there is a corresponding 
 dualism of forces in themselves endlessly expansive and disorderly 
 and of the divine will which checks and orders them; but there 
 is here nothing to justify the theory of two cosmic souls, one 
 good, the other evil. Apparently in the passage under con- 
 sideration Plato is thinking rather vaguely of such celestial in- 
 fluences, good and evil, as were to play so large a part in the 
 astrology of the Gnostics and others. In general (see the pas- 
 sage immediately following on page 897) Plato dwelt rather on 
 the ordered motion of the heavenly bodies as a symbol and model 
 of the order to be attained in the soul.— I cannot quite follow the 
 reasoning of Apelt who, in his note on this passage in his transla- 
 tion of the Laws, dismisses this mention of an evil world-soul as 
 rein hypothetisch. 
 
 897 
 
90 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 thing rightly and happily ; but if she takes unrea- 
 son as her associate, all her works are of the op- 
 posite character. 
 
 What kind of soul then shall we say is lord of 
 heaven and earth and all the revolving world? 
 that which is wise and replete with virtue, or that 
 which possesses neither of these qualities? If, as 
 we say, the whole path and orbit of heaven and 
 all things that move therein have a nature similar 
 to the motion and revolution and calculations 
 of reason and proceed in a manner akin to rea- 
 son, then evidently the best soul cares for the 
 universe and guides it in such a path as we see. 
 But if they proceed in a crazed and disorderly 
 manner, then the evil soul guides. The question 
 raised involves the nature of the motion of rea- 
 son, a question not easy to answer intelligently. 
 
 In attempting our answer, therefore, we will 
 not, like those who bring night into midday by 
 gazing directly at the sun, suppose that with 
 these our mortal eyes we can see reason and suf- 
 ficiently understand it. Our safer course will be 
 to look at an image of what we are seeking. And 
 for this image we will take that one of the ten 
 kinds of motion to which reason bears a resem- 
 blance. Now, turning back to what we then said, 
 we may recall this fact, that we first placed all 
 things under the two categories of motion and 
 rest. Then of things in motion we found that 
 
THE LAWS, BOOK X 91 
 
 some move without change of position, while 
 others are carried from one place to another. Of 
 these two kinds of motion that which occurs with- 
 out change of position must be motion about a 
 centre, as in the case of objects made perfectly 
 round by a lathe, and this, so far as we can make 
 such a comparison, bears the closest resemblance 
 to the revolution of reason. At least I hold it 
 rather a neat sort of metaphor to compare rea- 
 son and motion without change of position by say- 
 ing that each moves in an unvarying course and 
 manner in one place and about one centre and 
 with unaltering relations and by one law and 
 order; we think of the motion of reason as we 
 do of the revolution of a smoothly rounded 
 sphere. On the other hand motion that is not in 
 an unvarying course and manner, nor in one 
 place, nor about one centre, nor with unaltering 
 relations, nor uniform, but without system or 
 order or any law, — such motion is akin to all un- 
 reason.® 
 
 With these premises we are prepared to assert 
 boldly that, since soul is that which turns all 
 
 6 This argument may sound quaint and fanciful to the modern 
 reader; but Plato's thought is very much the same as Kant's 
 when he expressed his abiding wonder at the moral sense in 
 man and at the motions of the stars in the heavens. It is the 
 simple idea echoed by many of the poets who, like Dante and 
 Matthew Arnold, have found sjTnbols of strength and peace in 
 the celestial orbits. 
 
 898 
 
899 
 
 92 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 things about, the revolution of the heavens must 
 be undoubtedly the vi^ork of heedful and order- 
 giving soul, whether the best soul or its opposite. 
 Furthermore, in view of what has been said, it 
 would be impious to suppose that such motion is 
 bestowed by any other than soul endowed with 
 all virtues, whether that soul be one or more 
 than one. And still further, if soul guides the re- 
 volution of all the celestial bodies — sun, moon, 
 and the other stars — it must guide each of them 
 individually; so that, if we direct our argument 
 to one of these celestial bodies, what we say will 
 apply equally to the rest of them. Now we all 
 see the body of the sun, although no one sees its 
 soul — nor indeed the soul of any other creature's 
 body living or dead! yet we have a strong con- 
 viction that there does exist such a thing, too fine 
 to be perceived by our corporeal senses, but per- 
 ceptible to reason. Taking our stand then on 
 reason alone and reflection, we can make this 
 further point in confidence, that if soul guides the 
 sun, it does so in one of three ways : either resid- 
 ing within yonder visible spherical body it governs 
 the moving mass, exactly in such manner as the 
 soul in us causes all our motions ; or having pro- 
 vided itself with a body of fire or some form of 
 air, as some maintain, it impels the sun forcibly 
 from without, as body impels body; or, thirdly, 
 being itself naked of body, but having certain 
 
THE LAWS, BOOK X 93 
 
 other marvellous and incomprehensible powers, 
 it acts as guide. Now, whether riding the sun 
 as a chariot it brings light to all, or acting from 
 without, or however and in whatever manner, 
 this soul is of a nature superior to the sun, and 
 every one must recognize it as a god. And so 
 of all the stars and the moon, of the years and 
 months and various seasons, our account will be 
 the same. We shall say that, as soul or souls 
 have been shown to be the cause of all these, and 
 to be endowed with the excellence of every vir- 
 tue, they are gods, whether residing in bodies as 
 animate creatures, they govern the whole heaven, 
 or in whatsoever manner. Let a man, any man, 
 make these admissions and he will never endure 
 the idea that all things are not replete with 
 gods.^ . . . 
 
 We have, I think, sufficiently answered the 
 first class of objectors. Our next argument must 
 be directed to the man who acknowledges the ex- 
 istence of the gods, but holds that they have 
 no care for the affairs of mankind. To such an 
 one we will say : My good sir, in respect of your 
 acknowledgment of the gods, no doubt something 
 within you akin to the divine leads you to honour 
 and acknowledge its kind; but the fortunes of 
 evil and unjust men, in public and private life, 
 
 1 This is the saying as old as Thales : iravra irkyjpr) Bewv. 
 
94 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 [-.-. ,..•■^-— 
 
 not truly happy, but held to be happy in the 
 exaggerated opinions of the undiscerning, and 
 celebrated without regard to fact in song and 
 tales of every sort, — these are the things that 
 have brought you to impiety. Or perhaps you 
 have seen wicked old men reaching their term of 
 
 900 years and leaving their children's children in the 
 highest honours, and are amazed at the sight; 
 or you are troubled by the stories you have heard, 
 or by the spectacle before your own eyes, of men 
 frequently raising themselves from small estate 
 to tyranny and exalted place by their acts of im- 
 pious and high-handed wrong. And with these 
 things happening, manifestly you are unwilling, 
 by reason of that inner kinship, to blame the gods 
 as responsible for such events. And so, in your 
 inability either to reason the matter out or to 
 think ill of the gods, you have fallen into this 
 state of mind, wherein you admit their existence, 
 but believe they despise and disregard the affairs 
 of mankind. 
 
 So much we might say to our bewildered youth, 
 lucky indeed if we can find words to exorcize 
 such a belief before it passes into a worse form 
 of impiety. And in the first place it ought not 
 to be difficult to draw from him the admission 
 that the gods are not less careful of the little 
 things, that if anything they are more careful of 
 
 901b them, than of the great and conspicuous. . . . For 
 
THE LAWS, BOOK X 95 
 
 suppose some one has a certain task to perform, 
 a task that requires particular care, and suppose 
 that his mind pays heed to the great matters in- 
 volved but neglects the small, can we find any 
 good reason for commending him? Consider the 
 question. Whether god or man be the agent, 
 there can be only two explanations of such a 
 course of action: either he thinks it will make no 
 difference to the whole if the small matters are 
 neglected, or he sees the difference but is neglect- 
 ful by reason of effeminate slackness.^ 
 
 Now there are three of us here, and we may 
 issue this challenge both to the believer in the 
 gods who tliinks they are easily placated and to 
 the believer who thinks them neglectful of small 
 things. To begin with, you both say that the 
 gods know and see and hear all things, that noth- 
 ing is hid from them of which there can be per- 
 ception and knowledge. Further, you say all 
 things are possible to them within the power of 
 mortals and immortals. Still more, we all, the 
 five of us, have agreed that they are good, and 
 supremely good. How then can we possibly ad- 
 mit that they, being such as we believe them to 
 
 8 For padvfxia Koi rpvcfyrj I have taken a phrase from Paradise 
 Lost, xi, 630: "From man's effeminate slackness it begins." 
 Rhathifmia (easiness of temper, indolence, laziness, slackness) is 
 a word that becomes more and more important in the Greek 
 theories of evil, from Plato to Chrysostom. 
 
96 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 be, approach any work in the spirit of effeminate 
 slackness? . . . No, it can only be that, if they 
 neglect what is small and slight in relation to the 
 whole, they do so, either because they know they 
 have no reason to attend to any such thing — or, 
 is there any other alternative but ignorance? 
 
 And so we renew our question: My good sir, 
 shall we take you as averring that the gods are 
 ignorant and through ignorance neglect what 
 they ought to heed, or that, knowing their duty, 
 they resemble those very wretched men who, as 
 we say, know the better things, yet do the worse 
 by reason of their subjection to pleasures and 
 pains? Certainly neither this nor that. Now 
 the affairs of mankind belong to the animate part 
 of nature, and man himself is the most religious 
 of all living creatures. We assert, too, that all 
 mortal creatures, including the whole orb of 
 heaven, are the possession, as it were, the herd, 
 of the gods. Let a man, then, say that these 
 things are great to the gods, or small, in either 
 case would it behoove our owners, our shepherds 
 as it were, being of nature most heedful and good, 
 to neglect us? 
 
 And we may look at the matter in another 
 way. Perception and power are by nature con- 
 trary one to the other in respect of ease and dif- 
 ficulty. That is to say, it is more difficult to see 
 and hear small things than great, whereas it is 
 
THE LAWS, BOOK X 97 . 
 
 easier for any one to carry and master and care 
 for the small slight things than the contrary. 
 A physician, for instance, who has been called in 
 to cure the whole body, will scarcely succeed in 
 his business if, being willing and having the 
 power to care for the great symptoms, he neglects 
 the lesser members and symptoms. And the 
 same may be said of a pilot or general or hus- 
 bandman or statesman or any other manager 
 who cares for the many and great matters to the 
 neglect of the few and small. Just as a mason 
 will tell you that the large stones will not lie well 
 without little ones. Let us, therefore, not hold 
 God in less account than mortal artificers, who, 
 as they are more skilled, so more exactly and per- 
 fectly with their single art finish what is small 
 and what is great in the tasks set them; neither 
 let us suppose that God, the most wise, being 
 willing and having the power to attend, heeds the 
 great things, but neglects those little things which 903 
 are the more easily heeded, like some feckless and 
 lazy artificer who grows slack over his toil. Such 
 an opinion of the gods we will never admit; to 
 think thus of them would be neither holy nor 
 veracious. 
 
 And now at last we may seem to have talked 
 to some purpose with the man who likes to charge 
 the gods with neglect. Nevertheless, as our ar- 
 gimients hitherto have been rather of the sort 
 
98 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 to force him against his will to confess error, I 
 think we ought now to apply certain myths as 
 charms to his mind. Let us persuade the young 
 man, if words may avail, that all things have 
 been ordered by God, who has the world in care, 
 to the salvation and virtue of the whole, each 
 member passively and actively contributing its 
 part according to its abiUty. Over this multiform 
 world rulers have been set to govern sectionally 
 down to the smallest detail of what must be suf- 
 fered and done, to the end that each section may 
 be brought to its appointed consummation. Of 
 this system, O wretched man, thou art a single 
 part, which looks to the whole and tends to that, 
 though in itself of the least magnitude; yet it 
 has not occurred to thee that in such a system 
 every part of creation has its birth to the end 
 that the life and being of the whole may enjoy 
 happiness, not the whole for thee, but thou for 
 it. For every physician and every skilled artificer 
 does all things for all, yet, having his eye on what 
 tends to the common good, executes the part 
 for the whole and not the whole for the part. 
 But thou art vexed, not understanding how that 
 which happens to thee is best for the whole and 
 for thee, so far as the common creation permits. 
 And since a soul, appointed now to one body, now 
 to another, is forever undergoing all kinds of 
 change, by reason of itself or of another soul, 
 
THE LAWS, BOOK X 99 
 
 nothing remains for the draught-player to do 
 but to move to a better place that character which 
 has grown better, and that which has grown worse 
 to a worse place, according to the merit of each, 
 that it may obtain such a lot as behooves it. 
 
 Enough has been said, I think, to show how 
 easily the gods may care for all things. For if, 
 looking to the animate part of creation, the crea- 
 tor proceeded by a continual change of all things, 
 transforming fire, for instance, into cool water, 
 and making a multitude of things out of one or 
 one out of a multitude, then by the first or second ^04 
 or third transformation there would result an in- 
 finite mass of change; but as it is now, he who 
 cares for the whole enjoys a marvellous ease.® In 
 this way. Since our king sees the soul at work 
 everywhere, and in all its deeds much of virtue 
 and much of vice, and both soul and body, like the 
 
 9 1 am very much in doubt about the meaning of this diffi- 
 cult passage. Various emendations have been proposed, none of 
 vi^hich is quite satisfactory. My translation is based on the sup- 
 position that Plato is contrasting two ways in which the world- 
 ruler might deal with souls in accordance with their deserts. He 
 might so contrive the changes in the inanimate world that each 
 soul at any moment should be properly placed in respect of its 
 vice and virtue. This would be the difficult way and would result 
 in infinite perturbations of the natural order; it is the way de- 
 scribed above, and rejected. The other way would preserve the 
 regularity of the inanimate world, and would change the place 
 of the souls in this world according to their growth in vice and 
 virtue. This is the method of Providence he now proceeds to 
 describe. 
 
100 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 popular gods, not eternal, but indestructible (for 
 there would be no birth of living creature if either 
 of them should perish), and since he understands 
 that the good of the soul is by nature always 
 beneficent and the evil injurious — perceiving all 
 this, he has contrived that each member of the 
 living world be so placed as most easily and ef- 
 fectively to render virtue victorious and vice de- 
 feated. To this end he has contrived that the 
 character developed by us should determine the 
 character of our seat and the place occupied by 
 us at any time ; but the development of our par- 
 ticular character he has left to the will of each of 
 us. As a man desires and as is the character of 
 his soul, such and in such manner, for the most 
 part, each of us is born." 
 
 10 Cf. Phaedo 107d and Republic 618b. — This is also the later 
 Christian theory, although with a difference. For Plato change and 
 imperfection are inherent in the original substance of soul, and it 
 lies within the will of each of us to direct our metamorphoses to 
 ever better or ever baser states. The Christian attributed this 
 principle of change to the fact that the soul was created, like all 
 things else, ex nihilo; the very act of creation is a transition from 
 not-being to being, and is thus the cause and beginning of a 
 state of endless mutation. But the Christian, who is bound by 
 his creed to believe that creation as the work of God is in- 
 trinsically without blemish, refuses to see the cause of evil in 
 the condition of mutability itself; he exonerates the creator by 
 assuming that the principle of change in the creature assumes 
 the form of a voluntary and uncaused declination away from 
 God. (See, e.g., Athanasius, Contra Gentiles, and Gregory of 
 Nyssa, Catechetical Oration.) We shall have more to say of this 
 subject in another place. 
 
THE LAWS, BOOK X 101 
 
 All things, therefore, change that partake of 
 soul, having the cause of mutation within them- 
 selves, and as they change they are moved about 
 by the order and law of destiny. When the 
 alteration in their character is slight, their change 
 is small and, so to speak, on the same level ; when 
 it is great and much of injustice enters, they fall 
 into a deep place and into those lower regions 
 which under the names of Hades and the like fill 
 us with terror, and haunt our dreams in this world 
 and in our disembodied existence. Thus it hap- 
 pens, when the soul by its own vehement will or 
 by the strong influence of others partakes in 
 larger measure of vice or virtue, if by associa- 
 tion with divine virtue it becomes greatly virtu- 
 ous there is a great change in its place, a change 
 altogether for holiness, as it is carried into a bet- 
 ter home; but if it develops otherwise, the seat 
 of its life is changed accordingly. 
 
 This, my brave young son, who think you are 
 neglected by the gods, "this," as Homer says, "is 
 the justice of the gods who inhabit Olympus" — 
 that he who grows in vice shall make his journey 
 to the more vicious souls, and that he who grows 
 in virtue shall journey to the more virtuous souls, 
 receiving in life and in all his deaths such treat- 
 ment as it behooves like to receive from like. 
 Think not that you or any other shall ever 905 
 escape this justice or shall ever boast to have out- 
 
102 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 witted the gods; above all other laws of justice 
 this law has been ordained by those who have 
 ordained, and it were well to heed it with all 
 care. For never shall you be unheeded by it; 
 neither in your littleness shall you so sink into the 
 bowels of the earth, nor in your exaltation shall 
 you mount in flight to the heavens, but you shall 
 pay the fitting vengeance of the gods, either while 
 abiding here, or when you have made your jour- 
 ney to Hades, or have been conveyed to some 
 place more savage than these. And the same 
 reckoning is to be made of those whom you have 
 seen raising themselves from little to great by im- 
 pious deeds or other wickedness; it has seemed 
 to you that their state was a change from misery 
 to happiness, and so, looking upon their deeds, 
 you have thought to behold, as reflected in a mir- 
 rour, the total neglect of the gods, knowing not in 
 what way the lives of such men pay contribution 
 to the sum of things. Yet this above all you 
 ought to know, you who are so bold ; for without 
 this knowledge a man shall never see the type and 
 form of life," neither shall he have any right to 
 
 11 To the word tvtto?, "type and form," Lewis appends the 
 note: "That is, without this doctrine of the end of the wicked, 
 and of the manner in which the present suspension and the final 
 infliction of their doom contribute to the universal harmony, life 
 would have no meaning. It would be Tohu and Bohu (Genesis 
 i, 2), a moral chaos on which no intelligible form had been im- 
 pressed." — ^Thus we have the two orders. The phenomenal world 
 
THE LAWS, BOOK X 108 
 
 offer an opinion touching its happiness and un- 
 happy chances. If j^ou will hearken to us, a sen- 
 ate of old men, who tell you that you know not 
 what you are saying about the gods, God himself 
 will be your good helper. But if you are still 
 waiting for the word of conviction, then, if there 
 is any mind in you at all, Usten to what we say 
 to the third sceptic. For that the gods exist and 
 that they pay heed to men, I think we have suf- 
 ficiently demonstrated. The third point, that 
 they can be placated by unjust men with bribing 
 gifts, we must yield to no one, but rather must 
 disprove by every means within our power. 
 
 Come then, by the gods themselves, in what 
 way would they be placated by us, if so be they 
 are placated? Who and what would they be? 
 Rulers at least they are, if in their hands Hes the 
 
 is a sphere of mechanical law established on the flux, but our 
 place in this world is changed and determined by the gods in ac- 
 cordance with our conduct. The material world in itself is heed- 
 less of our wants— as Euripides says: "It profits us not at all 
 to be vexed with things, for it matters nothing to them" — but 
 the Providence of the gods is just. There is the physical law 
 of things and there is the moral law of souls, and these two 
 laws, so far as our limited vision reaches, seem to run side by 
 side without causal nexus or composition. So it is that, accord- 
 ing as our interest and concern are set on one of these laws, 
 the other law will appear to us as a sphere of unreality. For an 
 eloquent disquisition on the illusion of the phenomenal world and 
 the eternal reality of the moral order as they strike on the re- 
 ligious imagination, see the peroration (p. 729b ff) of Chrysostom's 
 seventy-sixth Homily on Matthew. 
 
104. THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 management of all this expanded world. But 
 rulers of what sort would they resemble? To 
 whom may we fairly liken them, comparing great 
 things with small ? Would they be such as drivers 
 of racing teams, or as pilots of vessels? Or per- 
 haps they might be likened to rulers of armies, 
 or to physicians who wage war against diseases 
 906 of the body, or to farmers who in fear for their 
 crops watch the customary bad seasons, or per- 
 haps to keepers of herds. We have already 
 agreed that the heavens are filled with powers of 
 good, many in number, and with contrary powers, 
 more numerous still than the good; and now we 
 say that we are involved with these in a deathless 
 battle needing a marvellous guard, and that the 
 gods and daemons^^ together are our allies and 
 we on the other hand are the property of the 
 gods and daemons. Injustice and insolence with 
 folly are our ruin, whereas our salvation is jus- 
 tice and temperance with wisdom, which last have 
 their habitation with the soul-powers of the gods, 
 yet here too in some small measure are seen to 
 dwell with us. Nevertheless, so it is said, cer- 
 tain souls, manifestly brutish, dwelling on earth 
 and enjoying the profits of evil-doing, pay homage 
 to the souls of the guardians (whether we liken 
 
 12 The reader needs scarcely to be reminded that in classical 
 Greek the word daemon means a power lower than the gods, but 
 not maleficent. 
 
THE LAWS, BOOK X 106 
 
 these to dogs or shepherds or see them quite as 
 the supreme lords), and so use the persuasion of 
 flattering words and of magic prayers as to win 
 the right to grasp at any advantage among men, 
 yet suffer no harm. Such at least is the rumour 
 spread by the wicked. But we say that this evil 
 of grasping advantage, as we have named it, if it 
 occurs in the body of our flesh is properly called 
 disease, in the annual seasons and the years pesti- 
 lence, and in cities and governments injustice, 
 which is only the same thing under another name. 
 Such necessarily would be the argument of one 
 who says that the gods are ever ready to pardon 
 unjust men and doers of injustice, if they will 
 share with the gods their spoils ; as if wolves were 
 to share a little of their ravages with the dogs, and 
 the dogs, being tamed by such gifts, should per- 
 mit the herds to be ravaged. Now would not a 
 man, whoever he may be, make himself simply 
 ridiculous by likening the gods to any of these 
 guards — to pilots, for instance, who should be 
 beguiled by libations and the mere vapour of 
 wine to make shipwreck of their vessels and sea- 
 men? or to drivers ranged in race who should be 
 persuaded by a gift to betray the victory to an- 
 other team? or to such generals, or physicians, or 
 farmers? or to herdsmen or to dogs who should 
 be charmed by wolves? Nay, of all guards the 907 
 gods together are the greatest, and their trust is 
 
106 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 over our greatest things. And shall we say that 
 the guardians of what is fairest, themselves dis- 
 tinguished for virtue in their trust, are baser than 
 dogs or the common run of mankind who yet 
 would never betray justice for the impious bribes 
 of the unjust? No. The very mention of it is 
 intolerable, and of all the workers of impiety, of 
 all impious men, he who clings to this belief would 
 be judged rightly the worst and most impious. 
 And so we may say we have sufficiently demon- 
 strated the three theses proposed by us : that the 
 gods exist, that they are heedful, that they are 
 implacable to the appeals of injustice. 
 
 It may be that the zeal of contention with evil 
 men has led me to speak with undue vehemence. 
 If I for my part have appeared contentious, it 
 was that such men might not prevail in the dis- 
 cussion and so suppose they had authority to act 
 as seemed to them good, in accordance with what- 
 ever views of the gods they might entertain. 
 Hence, I say, my zeal to speak trenchantly. And 
 if I have accomplished anything at all by way of 
 persuading these men to look on themselves with 
 disfavour and to embrace a different course of 
 life, I shall be well content with our preamble 
 to the laws on the subject of impiety. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 THEOLOGY : THE BEING OF GOD 
 
 The central theme of The Republic, that which 
 gives this dialogue its leading place in Plato's 
 works, is summed up in the phrase, the philoso- 
 phy of the soul: "Thither we must look," says 
 Socrates, "to the philosophy of it." To pursue 
 philosophy, to love wisdom, is to seek to know 
 one's soul, especially "to discern its true nature, 
 whether it be uniform or multiform." The whole 
 trend of the dialogue had been to show that 
 practically the soul is dual, having in it that 
 which rides above the distractions and passions 
 of this earthly existence, but having also within 
 it that which draws it down from its self-pos- 
 session by desires and appetites, pleasures and 
 pains, in some way associated with the flesh. 
 All experience points to this dualism of our 
 being, yet withal, though we are unremitting- 
 ly conscious of this divergent pull, we think 
 that in some mysterious manner the truth of 
 the soul, our higher self as we may regard it, 
 is that diviner member which endeavours to 
 shake itself free of those distracting impulses, 
 
 107 
 
 61lE 
 
108 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 as if they were earthly accretions cHnging to it 
 and deforming its beauty. We do unrighteous- 
 ness, yet we know that righteousness is the native 
 element of the soul, its true property, of which 
 somehow it has been deprived and for which it 
 longs as for its own.^ And this knowledge is con- 
 firmed by, rather is coincident with, a sense of 
 self -justification independent of the world's 
 judgment and rewards, which marks the progress 
 of the soul in righteousness and, as it were, back 
 to itself. So it is that knowledge of the soul, the 
 knowing one's self which was the command of 
 Apollo to all men of Greece, starts from and ter- 
 minates in the perception of justice as a thing de- 
 sirable in itself, and the profoundest philosophy, 
 after its manifold searching and questioning, 
 finds its goal at last in the simple axiom that is 
 on the lips of all mankind though so little under- 
 stood : virtue is its own reward, be good and you 
 will be happy. 
 
 We have seen further that, in order to bring 
 out this philosophical truth in its naked strength, 
 Plato was content for the time to leave a cleft 
 between the moral sense of justice in the soul and 
 the seeming disregard of morality and justice 
 in the physical conduct of the world. But at the 
 end of the tenth book, after the passage on the 
 philosophy of the soul, which is a summary and 
 
 1 Lysis 222d: To dyaObv Koi to oikcTov av ravrov <f>S>iicv eivat. 
 
THE BEING OF GOD 109 
 
 consummation of all that preceded, he suddenly 
 declares that besides the inner witness there is 
 yet another confirmation of the value of justice, 
 viz. the fate of the soul in its immortal progress 
 after death under the righteous judicature of the 
 gods. A larger view of life, he would say, will 
 reconcile the seeming disparities of destiny, and 
 will show that there is a divine government of 
 justice in the world as well as a human law of 
 justice in the soul. This is no withdrawal from 
 Plato's former position and contains no latent 
 contradiction, as some critics would have it; his 
 meaning is not for a moment that what he has to 
 add will be a repudiation of his philosophical 
 conclusion, but that theology and mythology are 
 complementary to his philosophy, the three form- 
 ing together the complete life of religion. The 
 clear simple truth, that which we learned from 
 immediate experience and intuition, has been 
 given to us by philosophy; this we can possess 
 without theology and without mythology, but, 
 having this, we have laid the foundation for the 
 superstructure of religion. In a way the super- 
 structure may even be greater and fairer than 
 the foundation; and Plato can say that the first 
 honour is due to the gods and only the second Laws 726 
 honour to the soul, — to speak otherwise, having 
 granted the existence of the gods, would be im- 
 pious and insolent. Nevertheless, as we shall 
 
110 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 see, the strongest evidence for the existence of the 
 gods is derived from the soul's own conscious- 
 ness of itself, and in logical order as in security 
 of conviction, philosophy takes the premier place 
 in the religion of Plato. 
 
 The concluding section of The Republic is 
 thrown into the form of myth, and its considera- 
 tion belongs to another place. Here we have to 
 deal with the theological treatise inserted in the 
 Laws, a translation of which was given in the 
 preceding chapter. It opens with a solemn state- 
 ment of the importance of accepting just those 
 three propositions wliich were rejected hypo- 
 thetically in the philosophical argimient of The 
 Republic, viz. the existence of the gods, their 
 providential care of humanity, and their inex- 
 orable justice. These are the three theses to be 
 estabHshed. The first belongs to theology pure 
 and simple, the second stands midway between 
 theology and mythology, and the third turns back 
 to theology with a new confirmation. 
 
 For the first thesis, the existence of God or of 
 the gods, Plato has three arguments: from de- 
 sign, as we should say; from intuition, or the 
 universality of belief, and from the nature of the 
 soul. Of these three the last is no more than a 
 development of the conclusion reached in the phi- 
 losophical part of The Republic, and it is on this 
 that he really rests his case. 
 
THE BEING OF GOD 111 
 
 As St. Paul declared that God has not left 
 Himself without a witness in the hearts of men, 
 "for the invisible things of Him from the crea- 
 tion of the world are clearly seen, being under- 
 stood by the things that are made, even His eter- 
 nal power and Godhead,'" so Plato, in his argu- 
 ment from design, points to the visible order of 
 the heavens, the stars and the universe, as an elo- 
 quent witness to the existence of a creator. Like 
 Paul, or the Pauhne writer to the Ephesians, he 
 saw in all that outspread beauty "the manifold 
 wisdom of God," and was not "ashamed" to con- 
 fess his belief. These variegated patterns Republic S29c 
 wrought out in the circle of the sky are but to- 
 kens, he says, of a spiritual world. Such is the 
 testimony from without, speaking in a language 
 clear and convincing, he thought, to those who 
 had eyes to see and ears to hear. And to this 
 argument corresponds the witness of intuition, 
 that all unsophisticated men, Greeks and bar- 
 barians, do believe in the existence of the gods. 
 Modesty alone, not to mention a proper scep- 
 ticism towards our individual powers of reason- 
 ing, ought to make us slow to accept our doubts 
 against the common-sense of the world. Yet he 
 knows that there are writings abroad which seek 
 to argue away this instinctive faith by explain- 
 ing the sun and moon and stars as mere masses 
 
 2 Romans i, 20. 
 
112 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 of matter moving with no spiritual force to guide 
 them, and by ridicuhng as old wives' tales the 
 beUefs taught at a mother's knee and expressed 
 in the acts of public worship. And these books 
 have an especial attraction for the knowing young 
 men of Athens. It is hard not to be indignant 
 with these wise moderns, these striplings, for the 
 most part, who make the assurance of youth a 
 substitute for reflection. He would like to say 
 of such men what Paul actually said of the same 
 class in his day: "Professing themselves to be 
 wise, they became fools."^ But vituperation is 
 not persuasion, and so he sets himself to reason 
 with them, gently; suppressing, if possible, his 
 feeling of indignation. 
 
 He proceeds then to his third and, as he thinks, 
 most cogent argument, based on the conception 
 of soul as that which alone possesses the faculty 
 of moving itself and of imparting motion to oth- 
 ers, whereas body, or matter, has only the faculty 
 of transmitting motion. In the natural order 
 of logic, that which originates motion, in a 
 world where all things are visibly moving, is 
 antecedent to that which is moved. "Thus soul 
 draws and leads all things in heaven and on 
 earth and in the sea by its own motions, which 
 we call willing, viewing, attending, considering, 
 opining rightly and wrongly, itself rejoicing or 
 
 3 Romans i, 22. 
 
THE BEING OF GOD 113 
 
 grieving, courageous or fearful, hating or lov- 
 ing." It will follow further that the revolution 
 of the heavens, which displays such manifest 
 beauty and regularity, must be the work of a 
 heedful and order-loving soul. The sun and 
 moon and stars have their course not by chance 
 but by the direction of guiding powers which are 
 consciously good, and over all the universe pre- 
 sides that great spirit which is no other than God. 
 
 Such in brief is Plato's main proof of the be- 
 ing of a deity, proffered by him as a substitute 
 for, or confirmation of, the common arguments 
 from design and the universality of belief. In- 
 evitably it raises two questions: first as to the 
 validity of the logic, secondly, granted the vahd- 
 ity, as to the meaning to us of such a God as it 
 establishes. 
 
 Now up to a certain point the logic of the 
 Athenian, who speaks for Plato, is convincing 
 and would meet today with few if any objectors. 
 No one is likely to dispute with him if he gives the 
 name "soul" to the cause, or principle, of motion 
 in the world, and the name "body," or "matter," 
 to that which transmits motion, provided always 
 he does not presume on the popular meaning 
 attached to the word soul. I take it that most 
 biologists of today will go a step further with 
 him and will accede to the definition of conscious- 
 ness as a faculty of self-motion. For such a 
 
114 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 statement I have at least the authority of a piece 
 of ephemeral literature* which would seem to be 
 fairly representative of the modern point of view. 
 The writer takes for his text a sentence from Bal- 
 zac: "If God is eternal be sure that he moves 
 perpetually — perhaps God is movement"; and 
 from this text he proceeds to the argument 
 (which is not precisely Balzac's as indeed Bal- 
 zac's intention is not quite Plato's) that "Hfe can 
 exist without consciousness, but not conscious- 
 ness, so far as we are aware, without life." The 
 data of biology, he thinks, show that animal life 
 begins with the advent of self-determined motion, 
 and consciousness would appear to be a further 
 development of this same faculty. "It is at 
 least," he says, "strictly in accordance with the 
 hypothesis of consciousness deriving from move- 
 ment that in human beings movement precedes 
 consciousness by some months, and conscious- 
 ness usually ceases some time before physical 
 death." That is to say the man of science to- 
 day will probably stand with Plato in rejecting 
 the crasser form of materialism and mechanism, 
 which prevailed among the Darwinians of the 
 mid-nineteenth century as it did among the know- 
 ing youth of Plato's Athens. He will admit the 
 existence of self-determined motion in the world, 
 
 4 The Heredity of the Soul, by A. Wyatt Tilby, in the Edinburgh 
 Review for January 1919. 
 
THE BEING OF GOD 115 
 
 and having made this admission, he must, if he 
 be reasonable, accept the introduction into his 
 scheme of things of a force indeterminable and 
 spontaneous and extra-scientific. He will agree, 
 again that is if he be reasonable, that conscious- 
 ness is connected with this self-determined mo- 
 tion, and so will grant to the human soul a par- 
 tial escape at least from the nexus of mechanical 
 cause and effect which enchains matter as the re- 
 ceiver and transmitter only of motion. So far 
 the man of science may go, perhaps is likely to 
 go; but, granting so much, he may consistently 
 draw back from the conclusion which Plato had 
 in view. Consciousness, that is to say, all that 
 gave any significance to soul as Plato thought of 
 it, may be merely a derivation from, and secon- 
 dary quality of, self-motion ; and there is no proof 
 that it is co-extensive with such motion, going 
 back to the self-moving power, whatever that 
 may be, which is the origin of all motion — noth- 
 ing, from these admissions, to force the inference 
 that soul, in this sense, as including reason and 
 the aesthetic and moral judgments, is antecedent 
 to such attributes of motion as are indicated by 
 heavy and light, swift and slow, etc., much less 
 the inference that God, as synonymous with such 
 a soul, is the author and governor of the world 
 as we know it. 
 
 No, it cannot be said that Plato's attempt to 
 
30a 
 
 116 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 prove the existence of God by logical demon- 
 stration from the nature of motion is rigidly con- 
 vincing; though I think it fair to add that this 
 demonstration, rightly understood, is less uncon- 
 vincing than the ontological syllogism of Anselm 
 and Spinoza and others of later date. And I 
 suspect that Plato himself was aware of the final 
 inadequacy of pure reason here, as in the whole 
 metaphysical field. Otherwise why should he 
 have based the great argument of The Republic, 
 where he was looking for certainty, on a hypo- 
 thetical atheism? You cannot conceive his imder- 
 taking, in like manner, to argue for the being of 
 God from a hypothetical rejection of the soul's 
 existence and of its irrefragable consciousness of 
 the value of righteousness. In other words his 
 theology is really an ethical sequel to that spir- 
 itual affirmation which he took from the lips of 
 Socrates: It is better to do justice, better, if 
 needs be, to suffer all injustice, than to do injus- 
 tice; and this I know as I know the being of my 
 own soul, though all else be shrouded in dark- 
 ness and mystery. Granted this, as it must be 
 granted, then Plato would say, indeed he has said 
 in the Philehus, that as it is absurd to see in 
 our material body anything more than a minute 
 fragment of the body of the universe, so it is fatu- 
 ous to suppose that our human soul, with its sense 
 of justice and injustice, its foresight and after- 
 
THE BEING OF GOD 117 
 
 thought, exists alone, with nothing corresponding 
 to it in the world at large. And so, granted the 
 existence of a cosmic soul, the argument from 
 priority will follow, but still rather as an argu- 
 meiitum ad hominem, an appeal to interest, than 
 as a metaphysical demonstration. He whose at- 
 tention is set on the things of the soul will by the 
 natural gravity of interest think of the soul as 
 prior in power and worth to the body, whether 
 in himself or in the universe.^ It will be impos- 
 sible for him to fall in with the theories, be it of 
 the ancient Democriteans or of the modern evo- 
 lutionists, which regard a purely mechanical self- 
 motion as first in the order of things and the 
 conscious self-motion of the soul as a develop- 
 ment out of blind mechanism at some point of 
 time. That will seem to him the last absurdity. 
 Nothing will be able to shake him out of his be- 
 lief that there has been a self-conscious, self -mov- 
 ing soul in the world from the beginning; in sim- 
 pler language, that God is. If he has looked 
 deeply and honestly into the matter, he will not 
 contend that this behef is quite of the same kind 
 as the knowledge of his own soul, and he will 
 admit that the object of his belief is seen more or 
 less vaguely through the haze of distance. But 
 
 5 Timaeus 46d: Tov h\ vov koX eTrtCTTi;//.?;? ipacrrrjv dvdyKr] ra? 
 T^S ifi<l>povo<: <f>vcre(t)<; atrtias Tr/owras /xcTaSiwKctv, oaai Se vir' dXXwv 
 fiiv Kivov/xevtov, Inpa Si c^ dva.yK-q<i kivovvtwv yiyvovrac, Serrepas. 
 
118 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 he will hold that his belief is at the least more 
 reasonable than the dogmatic negation of the 
 atheist and more tenable than the sceptical sus- 
 pense of the agnostic. In a metaphor dear to 
 Plato and all the Platonists, he would liken the 
 central truth of philosophy to the sun in the 
 heavens, which throws out its light in circles ever 
 widening and ever lessening in radiance with their 
 distance from the source. So, he would say, the 
 truths of theology are not the sun of our spiritual 
 life, but though, like the greater planets, they 
 shine only with reflected splendour, yet are they 
 luminous still through the darkness of our night 
 with unwavering beauty and majesty.'' 
 
 As for the value of such a belief, that will de- 
 pend mainly on the character of its object. What 
 and who is the God of the Platonic religion? 
 The "philosophy of the soul" taught us that there 
 is something within us set apart from the sway of 
 passion, unchanged amid all that changes, our 
 truer Self; and by analogy God, who is conceived 
 in the likeness of the soul, ought also to be im- 
 mutable, incapable of falsehood, without blemish 
 of evil. And these are the qualities actually at- 
 tributed to him in the outlines of theology 
 sketched in the second book of The Republic.'' 
 God is, in his character, forever immutable; 
 
 6 See Appendix B. 
 
 7 379a: Ot ruVoi "Ttpl 6toXoyta<i. 
 
THE BEING OF GOD 119 
 
 there is no power outside of him strong enough 
 to alter his being, nor has he within himself 
 any defect which calls for reparation. No ene- 
 my exists who should frighten him to take 
 refuge in deception; no one is dear to him who 
 should need to be beguiled by false appearances. 
 Rather, he is perfectly simple and true in 
 thought and deed ; and the signs and visions that 
 mislead men in their waking and sleeping are not 
 from him. He is good, and desires the harm of 
 no one; beneficent, and does no evil nor is the 
 cause of any evil ; all that is good proceeds from 
 him, but for the evil things in the world and in 
 the heart of man he is not responsible. The 
 gods — or God in the collective sense — are wise 
 also, as they are good; they see and hear all things Laws 9oid 
 that fall within the range of perception, and all 
 things are possible to them within the power of 
 mortals or immortals. These are the attributes 
 of Plato's deity; of omniscience, omnipotence, 
 ubiquity, and other metaphysical abstractions 
 Plato has no word, or, if he seems anywhere to 
 suggest them, they are repudiated by the whole 
 tenor of his theology and mythology. 
 
 In connection with this avoidance of meta- 
 physical terms, it is important to utter a warn- 
 ing against two kindred and persistent errors in 
 the interpretation of Plato's theology: the iden- 
 tification of God with Ideas and the denial to 
 
120 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 God of personality. The deity is morally im- 
 mutable but not immutability, perfectly true and 
 good but not truth itself or goodness itself. Al- 
 
 Repubiic so9Bj^Qgt^ ij^ one place, Plato absorbs God into the 
 Idea of goodness, but not quite, and in the 
 V Timaeus he is careful to speak of the creator as 
 
 good, never as goodness. To have fallen into 
 such an identification would have been to confuse 
 the boundaries of philosophy and theology with 
 results disastrous to his whole system of religion ; 
 it was left for the Neoplatonists and for over- 
 zealous Christian theologians to forget these dis- 
 tinctions. Of this error we shall have more to 
 say later; it is sufficient here to assert emphatical- 
 ly that for Plato God was not a philosophical 
 entity, much less a metaphysical abstraction, but 
 
 Timaeus 28c truly thc makcr and father of the world. 
 
 The denial of personality to Plato's God, so 
 far as I can understand the case, rests on two 
 grounds: one general, being a supposition that 
 the very conception of personality was lacking 
 to the Greeks, the other particular to the Platonic 
 philosophy. As for the first of these grounds, 
 whatever plausibility it possesses would seem to 
 be derived from the absence in Greek of any term 
 corresponding precisely with our word "person." 
 Because the Greek tongue wants the term, there- 
 fore, it is argued, the Greek mind lacked the con- 
 ception. But this, I maintain, is a linguistic fal- 
 
THE BEING OF GOD 121 
 
 lacy. It may be conceded that such a defect of 
 terminology would make itself felt in various 
 ways, more especially in the field of technical ht- 
 erature;® but to say that the sense itself of per- 
 sonality was lacking to the minds that created 
 the Homeric poems, the Attic tragedy, and the 
 Platonic Dialogues is an absurdity on the face 
 of it. Is Odysseus no person, or Antigone, or the 
 Socrates of the Apology and the Phaedo^. And 
 I am afraid that the extension of this linguistic 
 fallacy into the subject matter of rehgion is only 
 one phase of a wide-spread and rather ugly form 
 of conceit. You might suppose, from the solem- 
 nity with which the word "personality" is pro- 
 nounced by a certain school of modern theolo- 
 gians and philosophers of a theological cast, that 
 some new panacea had been discovered, capable 
 of curing every spiritual ailment of the soul. In 
 the volume of Mansfield College Essays, for in- 
 stance, one of the contributors, Mr. A. N. Row- 
 land, exclaims pontifically that "personality is 
 the one mystery that eludes the grasp of science," 
 and so it is ; but does it follow that the utterance 
 of the mystic formula is going to solve the dif- 
 ficulties of religious faith which have been troub- 
 
 8 The case is quite similar to the deficiency in respect to "re- 
 ligion." Greek had special words for the various aspects of "per- 
 sonality" (psycM, prosopon, hypostasis), but no clearly defined 
 term for the general conception. 
 
122 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 ling an ignorant world for some thousands of 
 years? Shall we forget that long ago the Chris- 
 tian Church almost wrecked itself in the Nes- 
 torian and Eutychian controversy over the hypo- 
 stasis and prosopon, which is about the same as 
 to say the "personality," of Jesus? 
 
 The second ground of denial runs parallel with 
 the rejection of personal immortality as incom- 
 patible with Plato's Idealism.'' It is entirely of 
 a piece with that Hegelian interpretation of the 
 Dialogues in the spirit of Plotinus, and is, I do 
 not hesitate to say, the most mischievous error 
 in the history of philosophy. Surely the den- 
 izens of Olympus were human and personal be- 
 yond the gods of any other of the great religions 
 known to us. If Zeus and Hera were not per- 
 sonalities, I do not see what meaning is to be at- 
 tached to the word, and neither Socrates nor 
 Plato ever rejected these gods of the people, 
 though they strove to purify and supplement the 
 common conception of them. And the high God 
 
 9 An interesting and popular statement of the metaphysical 
 position, with references to Zeller and others, may be found in 
 John Oakesmith's Religion of Plutarch, p. 205. Mr. Oakesmith 
 himself thinks that Plutarch has advanced in philosophy by his 
 belief in a personal God, whereas "the element of personality is 
 totally absent" from Plato's conception. I should say rather 
 that Plutarch's strength lay in holding fast to a true Platonism, 
 in this respect at least, against the invasion of an Aristotelian 
 metaphysic which was about to culminate in Neoplatonism. 
 
THE BEING OF GOD 123 
 
 of philosophy, whom Plato would impose on the 
 polytheistic mythology, was still himian and per- 
 sonal. "The two essential constituents of human 
 personality," says Mr. Rowland in the essay al- 
 ready quoted, "are self-consciousness and self- 
 determination." But these were just the quali- 
 ties from which Plato in the theological tract of 
 the Laws drew his argument for the priority of 
 soul to matter and for the consequent existence of 
 God. Soul, psyche, is that in man which is self- 
 conscious and self-determined^" — it is in fact in 
 one of its senses almost an equivalent for our 
 word personality — and God is to the universe 
 what the soul is to man, and something more. 
 What else can be made of the argument from a 
 self-motion which is distinguished from a mechan- 
 ically transmitted motion by the attributes of 
 thought and feeling, the sense of beauty and ug- 
 liness, right and wrong? 
 
 The God whom Socrates served and Plato 
 preached was not an empty generalization of 
 metaphysics and was closer to the human heart 
 than the nominis umbra which the Deists, as chil- 
 dren of the ancient Porch, pretended to adore as 
 
 10 So in the Timaeus 77b Plato combines self-motion and self- 
 consciousness in his distinction between plants and men: "The 
 plant was not endowed by nature with the faculty of observing 
 its own being and reflecting thereon; hence it lives and is in a 
 way a living creature, but is stationary and rooted in its place, 
 because it lacks the power of self-motion." 
 
IM THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 a semi-personification of scientific law. Plato 
 was still a poet of the race of Homer and Pindar 
 and Aeschylus, though the first of philosophers. 
 But it would be shirking the truth to ignore the 
 fact that the supreme Deity of Platonism, while 
 far removed from the First Cause of metaphysics 
 and science, is left somewhat vague by the denu- 
 dation of the warmer traits of the mythological 
 imagination. I would preserve, if possible, a just 
 measure in my apology. Plato, it must be ad- 
 mitted, is as cautious in what he does not say of 
 God as he is confident in what he does say, and he 
 repeatedly gives warning against the assumption 
 of knowing more than we actually know. "It 
 is hard," he declares, "to discover the maker and 
 father of the universe, and impossible, when dis- 
 covered, to express him to all men." Yet withal 
 he will not utterly suppress curiosity in these 
 high matters, or acquiesce in silence ; he will even 
 take a stand in opposition to the sham modesty 
 which would forbid a man "to search into or be 
 over curious about the Greatest God and the 
 universe as a whole."^^ The point to be made 
 
 11 These two passages, Timaeus 28c and Laws 821a, are among 
 the most influential in Plato's works, and innumerable echoes of 
 them will be found in the Hellenistic writers. The passage of the 
 Timaeus is grasped at by Christian apologists to show the in- 
 feriority of pagan speculation to revealed theology. The passage 
 of the Laws was taken by Cicero (De Nat. Deor. i, 12) without 
 its context and so quite misunderstood. By the Christians it was 
 
THE BEING OF GOD 125 
 
 from these two memorable passages is simply the 
 reverence of Plato always in his approach to this 
 theme — a reverence which might be described as 
 a feeling compounded of the Socratic affirmation 
 and the Socratic scepticism. The spirit in which 
 he conducted his inquiry may be learned from 
 the three minor theological dialogues — the 
 Eiithyphro, if that marvellous Httle work can be 
 called minor, the Second Alcihiades, and part of 
 the Lysis. 
 
 Now it may be granted at once that this reti- 
 cence before the divine mystery, this confessed 
 ignorance of God's nature as revealed to the 
 Jew by prophecy and to the Christian by the in- 
 carnation, leaves the Platonic Deity a pale con- 
 ception by the side of Jehovah or of the divinely 
 compassionate Father, a conception lacking com- 
 paratively in driving force and wanting in some 
 of the deeper human consolations, although, in 
 compensation, it is free also of the sharper in- 
 centives to fanaticism which have maddened so 
 many religious communities. We may grant so 
 
 commonly quoted, or echoed, as a command against over-curiosity. 
 So, e.g., Chrysostom {In Rom. 641d) admonishes those who would 
 insist on the logical difficulties of election and reprobation: "Be 
 not over-curious about God." See also In Mat. 775e. The Christian 
 preacher, I think, was not far from the real meaning of Plato, 
 as Hobbes certainly was very far when, in his Letter About Lib- 
 erty and Necessity, he said: "We ought not to dispute of God's 
 Nature, he is no fit subject for our Philosophy." 
 
126 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 much; but still for all that is necessary to the 
 religious life of a man, for the large things of the 
 spirit, the theology of Plato is sufficient. Thus 
 much we know — and it is the gist of the whole 
 matter — that the souls of men are not set adrift 
 in a soulless world, either to fortify themselves 
 in the harsh pride of indifference or to sink down 
 in abject terror at the thought of their loneliness. 
 However humbly Plato may have shrunk from 
 defining the maker and father of the universe, 
 his God is not the Unknowable of the dogmatiz- 
 ing agnostic. He who reads Plato's theological 
 discourse may recall Spencer's desolating con- 
 fession at the end of his life: 
 
 "There is one aspect of the Great Enigma to 
 which Httle attention seems given, but which has 
 of late years more frequently impressed me. I 
 refer not to the problems which all concrete ex- 
 istence, from suns down to microbes, present, but 
 to those presented by the universal form under 
 which these exist — the phenomena of Space. . . . 
 
 "And then comes the thought of this universal 
 matrix itself, anteceding alike creation and evolu- 
 tion, whichever be assumed, and infinitely trans- 
 cending both, alike in extent and duration ; since 
 both, if conceived at all, must be conceived as hav- 
 ing had beginnings, while Space had no begin- 
 ning. The thought of this blank form of exist- 
 ence which, explored in all directions as far as 
 
THE BEING OF GOD 127 
 
 imagination can reach, has, beyond that, an un- 
 explored region compared with which the part 
 which imagination has traversed is but infinitesi- 
 mal — the thought of a Space compared with 
 which our immeasurable sidereal system dwindles 
 to a point, is a thought too overwhelming to be 
 dwelt upon. Of late years the consciousness that 
 without origin or cause infinite Space has ever 
 existed and must ever exist, produces in me a 
 feeling from which I shrink.'"" 
 
 Say what one will, these blank misgivings are 
 the inevitable outcome of a practical atheism that 
 has not numbed the imagination into sleep ; they 
 follow inexorably, as it were the Erinyes of phi- 
 losophy, any conception of the world as a huge 
 unconscious mechanism, at the heart of which 
 sits blind Chance or blind Law. We may believe 
 of Lucretius, the supremely great spokesman of 
 all those against whom Plato was contending in 
 his theolog}^ greater than any who succeeded 
 him, 
 
 "Who dropped his plummet down the broad 
 Deep universe, and said 'No God,' 
 Finding no bottom" — ^^ 
 
 we may believe of him that he was "nobler than 
 his mood," but if we do so it is because his infinite 
 sadness teaches a truth he himself could not learn. 
 
 12 Ultimate Questions 301-304. — See Shelburne Essays XI, 146. 
 
 13 Mrs. Browning, A Vision of Poets. 
 
128 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 From all such blank misgivings the Platonist is 
 set free. So certain is he of a supernatural power 
 ruling the world and displaying itself in the 
 larger spectacles of nature, that he is able to draw 
 from these a lesson for the ordering of his own 
 soul. He will go further than this, and will be- 
 lieve that the sun and moon and the other lumi- 
 naries above us are not merely signs of a central 
 wisdom from which all order springs, but are 
 themselves gods, or the visible chariots of gods. 
 It was in fact not the least advantage of Plato's 
 untrammeled theology that it left room in the 
 '^ universe for a host of lesser deities, the two con- 
 ceptions of monotheism and polytheism being not 
 antagonistic or mutually exclusive, but rather dif- 
 ferent aspects of one and the same truth. And 
 so, besides those more philosophic gods who ride 
 I the spheres, Plato is not afraid to acknowledge 
 
 the gods of the people, including the whole 
 hierarchy that extends from Zeus upwards 
 through Cronos to the vaguer personifications of 
 Earth and Ocean and Sky, and down through 
 the lessening generations. The good things of 
 life are the gifts of the divine bounty, and our 
 gratitude for the dance, let us say, may well be 
 directed to Apollo and the Muses, and for the 
 Laws 672AD cxhilaratiou of the vine we may praise Dionysus. 
 In their pity for mankind the gods have bestowed 
 these blessings, and shall we withhold our thanks- 
 
THE BEING OF GOD 129 
 
 giving because we know not in what manner the 
 invisible donors greet one another in the heavenly 
 ways? Even the Di minorum, gentium, each "lit- 
 tle god of small things,"" who walked unseen 
 with the plowman at his plow and watched the 
 mother as she nursed her child, need not be ex- 
 cluded from the philosopher's pantheon. Of all 
 these gods, great or humble, Plato will say that 
 we have no certain or even probable proofs ; but 
 their names have come down to us from remote 
 antiquity when perhaps mankind was more in- 
 timate with its divine source, and why should we 
 reject them? "All things are full of the gods"; 
 this we know, and how can we speak better of 
 them than as we have been taught by tradition? 
 But though Plato so far accepts the popular 
 beUef in a spirit of more or less sceptical ac- 
 quiescence, he deals very differently with the cur- 
 rent tales that attributed loose or immoral con- 
 duct to the gods. Such stories he repudiates al- 
 ways with the utmost indignation. Even the 
 human passions of a more innocent character he 
 is inclined to repudiate as incompatible with any 
 form of the divine nature, and to one who has 
 
 i*From the fine epigram of Perses (Kd/Ae tov Iv (T(xtKpol<i 
 oXlyov 6t6v\ which Mr. Mackail translates: "Even me the little 
 god of small things if thou call upon in due season thou shalt 
 find; but ask not for great things; since whatsoever a god of 
 the commons can give to a labouring man, of this I, Tycho, have 
 control." 
 
130 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 read the second book of The Republic it may 
 seem that he has left to the happy immortals of 
 the Homeric Olympus little more than Homer 
 himself left to the shades of the underworld. Let 
 us admit that there is some difficulty in accept- 
 ing the Zeus and Apollo of tradition while strip- 
 ping them of what really invested them, in the 
 popular mind, with the substance of life. Yet 
 Plato might say that inconsistency in such mat- 
 ters is almost another word for humility; and he 
 might add that traits were still left to the gods 
 sufficient to present them to the imagination as 
 living entities — Zeus with his thunderbolts and 
 Apollo with his lyre — without degrading them 
 by admixture of the baser instincts of men. The 
 untutored mind may have true glimpses of the 
 coming and going of the immortals, though it 
 wrap the truth about with its own coarser fan- 
 cies. 
 
 But the manifestations of the divine nature did 
 not end with the greater gods of the poets, or with 
 those lesser beings who haunted the springs and 
 glens and other fair spots of the earth or stood 
 by men in their toils and pleasures. Still below 
 these was the strange race of daemons, those mys- 
 terious forces from the invisible world to whom 
 no specific names were given and who were 
 scarcely personified, if at all. By the very vague- 
 ness of their nature these would appeal to the 
 
THE BEING OF GOD 131 
 
 philosophic mind which was reaching out for some 
 point of contact between a new conception of the 
 divine and the popular mythology. So, it will 
 be remembered, a reverence for the daemon, or the 
 daemonic power, was the basis of the charge 
 brought against Socrates as an introducer of new 
 gods; this reverence was indeed, in the form 
 given to it by him, the beginning of a new re- 
 ligion, which was taken up by Plato and so passed 
 on to the world/^ The same behef will be found 
 in the philosophers of the Hellenistic age who 
 drew on Socrates and Plato for their faith; it 
 plays no insignificant role among the Christians," 
 whose conception of the Logos was deeply af- 
 fected by remembrance of the Platonic dai- 
 monioji, though they were wont to conceal their 
 indebtedness by converting the daemons into 
 devils. 
 
 Plutarch more especially deals with the sub- 
 ject in his discussion of The Daemon of Socrates 
 and in his two essays on the oracles. As for his 
 explanation of the Socratic daemon he would 
 have us believe that it goes back to a statement 
 
 15 It might even be said that "the daemonic" (to 8ai/iovtov) 
 is the nearest equivalent in the Greek language for our word "re- 
 ligion." So Hug in his excellent note to the Symposium 202e: 
 "Den Damonen wird in diesen Satzen das ganze Gebiet der Re- 
 ligion zugewiesen, wofiir den Griechen ein zusammenfassender 
 Begriff fehlt." 
 
 18 Justin MartjT, Apologia II, x. 
 
132 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 of one of the two Theban Pythagoreans who 
 were present with Socrates on the day of his 
 death. Whether this is a bit of dramatic fiction 
 or not, Plutarch has given expression to the view 
 that was current in his age and that became al- 
 most the central dogma of Platonism for later 
 times — such at least it was for the so-called Cam- 
 bridge Platonists of the seventeenth century. 
 The story is that Simias once asked Socrates 
 about the daemon, and, receiving no answer, had 
 not repeated his question. But he had often 
 heard Socrates declare those to be vain pretend- 
 ers who said they had seen a divine apparition, 
 whereas he would gladly hearken to those who 
 thought they had heard a voice. Hence the con- 
 jecture that this daemon of Socrates was not an 
 apparition, but rather the perception of a voice 
 or an apprehension of speech conveyed to him in 
 some unaccountable manner, as in a dream there 
 is no real voice yet we have fancies and appre- 
 hensions that make us imagine we hear some one 
 speak. Such a perception is common in dreams, 
 because the body whilst we sleep is quiet and un- 
 perturbed; but Socrates' soul, being pure and 
 free from passion, and mixing itself with the body 
 no more than necessity required, was easy to be 
 moved and apt to take an impression from any 
 light influence; and that which influenced it was 
 not a sound, but what one might call the un- 
 
THE BEING OF GOD 133 
 
 spoken word {logon aneu phones) of a daemon 
 impressed immediately on the mind. We, it is 
 true, as it were groping in the dark, find out one 
 another's conceptions by the voice; but the con- 
 ceptions of the daemons carry a hght with them, 
 and shine for those who are able to perceive, so 
 that there is no need of words such as we use as 
 signs to one another, seeing thereby only the 
 images of the conceptions. Most men believe 
 that daemons communicate illuminations to us 
 in sleep, but think it strange that they should 
 communicate the like to us whilst we are awake 
 and have our senses and reason vigorous ; as wise 
 a fancy as it is to imagine that a musician can 
 use his harp when the strings are slack, but can- 
 not play when they are screwed up and in tune. 
 For such men do not consider that the effect is 
 hindered by the unquietness and incapacity of 
 their minds; from which inconvenience Socrates 
 was free, as the oracle assured his father whilst 
 he was a boy." 
 
 Whatever may have been the ultimate source 
 of this explanation of the Socratic guide, it was 
 on such a theory that Plutarch built up his own 
 religious creed, as expounded in the two essays on 
 
 17 De Genio Socratis 20. Abridged and adapted from the trans- 
 lation revised by W. W. Goodwin. For a hint of the same ex- 
 planation given by a younger contemporary of Socrates, see the 
 Memorabilia of Xenophon, IV, iii. 
 
134 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 the oracles. Deity, he says, appears to us in this 
 -world of material phenomena as the race of dae- 
 mons, through whom men communicate with the 
 gods and are made one with them/^ Through 
 the daemons come oracles and all intimations of 
 things in the womb of nature ; and if the oracular 
 voices are obscure and broken and fallible, it is 
 because the daemon himself belongs to a low 
 order of the hierarchy and furthermore is obliged 
 to communicate with us by means of the resist- 
 ing medium of a human soul and material or- 
 gans." From the same daemonic otherworld 
 comes the voice, or shadow of a voice, that brings 
 warnings to the individual soul, heard vaguely 
 at times by all men but comprehended only by 
 
 18 De Defectu Oraculorum 10, et passim. The same thought is 
 developed even more precisely by another Platonist, Maximus 
 Tyrius, in the ninth and eleventh of his Discourses. The latter of 
 these closes with a striking account of the celestial hierarchy: 
 "Consider the great King himself, unmovlng, like Law, to those 
 that obey passing on the security that exists in himself. Consider 
 also those that share in his government; many visible gods, many 
 invisible, some clustering about his threshold as courtly ushers 
 and princes of the blood, familiar at his table and hearth; others 
 the servants of these, and others still inferior. You behold the 
 succession and ranks of authority descending from God to earth." 
 
 19 De Pythiae OracuUs 21. Plutarch's argument is amusingly 
 like that of our modern spiritualists who apologize for the stam- 
 mering utterance and the vacuity of the supposed communica- 
 tions from the dead. But I think Plutarch would have found the 
 reports of our stances more disturbing to his faith in the unseen 
 world than he found the priestly records of Delphi and the other 
 oracular sites of Greece. 
 
THE BEING OF GOD 135 
 
 those who have attuned their body until it has 
 become as it were a sounding board for these 
 celestial echoes. 
 
 This Plutarchian sense of the daemonic, or of 
 the undefined spirit as we might say; everywhere 
 interpenetrating the visible world, lay, I think, 
 in the background also of Plato's theology. We Timaeus 90a 
 are plants not of an earthly but of a heavenly 
 growth; the soul is a creature of the gods and 
 had elsewhere its rising, and some day, if we Phaedrus 
 practise philosophy in the love of true knowledge 
 and true virtue, the soul shall be lifted up again 
 as in a winged chariot to be with the gods and 
 to know them as they are, and move with them 
 in their procession behind the great God of all, 
 to a place whence they and we shall contemplate 
 with pure joy the supernal beauty which is not 
 of this world. But now it is not so. Now the 
 soul is held down with earthly weights, and its 
 desires are not clean, and before its eyes are the 
 veils of the flesh. What the gods behold in un- 
 clouded splendour, we see only in shadows and 
 signs; and when thej^ speak to us of their vision 
 and of what our life should be, we hear their 
 voices faintly and indistinctly as sounds borne to 
 us from afar on the winds. Now our communion 
 is not so much with the gods directly — though 
 they too are really near at hand — as with the 
 daemons, or the daemonic soul of the world. This 
 
136 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 Symposium it is that Rcts as interpreter, or ferryman, between 
 202E ff. gQ(js and men, carrying our petitions and offer- 
 ings to the gods and bringing to us their com- 
 mands and answers, being, as it were, an inter- 
 mediary which bridges the interval between the 
 mortal and the immortal and binds the whole to- 
 gether into one unbroken order. By the dae- 
 monic provision we have the art of divination and 
 are instructed in the ceremonies of religion, and 
 through it we learn the charms and mystic rites 
 that pacify the terror of our lonely state. He 
 who has attained to wisdom in these matters is 
 the daemonic man, whereas those who have ac- 
 quired cunning in the other arts are only crafts- 
 men of a vulgar sort. Many are the daemons 
 and many their kinds, and one of them is the 
 love that raises the desire of the soul from earthly 
 to heavenly things. 
 
 Plato's theology is thus an extension of his 
 "philosophy of the soul," and the strength of his 
 conviction might be summed up in a later say- 
 ing: "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they 
 shall see God" — or rather, changing the accent, 
 he would say : For they shall see with God. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 THEOLOGY: PROVIDENCE AND JUSTICE 
 
 The background, so to speak, of Plato's re- 
 ligion is that sense of the daemonic lying every- 
 where half-concealed and half-revealed behind the 
 material phenomena of the world ; but in the pre- 
 amble to the Laws he is dealing more specifically 
 with the theological problem of God as the su- 
 preme personal force in the divine hierarchy. We 
 have seen how he sought to establish the being 
 of such a deity; the two remaining questions are 
 the Providence of God and the inexorability of 
 his justice. Now we know from The Republic 
 that the moral qualities which can be attributed 
 certainly to God are goodness and wisdom, truth 
 and immutability, and we shall not go astray in 
 looking to these attributes to find the rule of his 
 activity as it is concerned with our own being: 
 Providence will be the working of God's goodness 
 and wisdom, the inexorable rigour of the divine 
 justice will be a corollary of his truth and im- 
 mutability. 
 
 God is good, Plato says in the Timaeus, and 
 having no envy desired all things to be as like to 29b 
 himself as possible; this indeed is the sovereign 
 
 137 
 
138 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 principle of creation and of the cosmos. And in 
 the preamble to the Laws this same attribute of 
 goodness is extended to his ceaseless care of that 
 which has been created; there is no dullness or 
 indifference in his good-will that he should neg- 
 lect his handiwork and abandon its maintenance 
 to the fumbling fingers of Chance or to the re- 
 lentless hand of Fate. Plato's argument for 
 Providence is merely an extension of his diatribe 
 against the followers of Democritus and Prota- 
 goras, better known to us in their later develop- 
 ment as Epicureans. These men, whether for 
 prudential reasons or from conviction, were will- 
 ing, if pressed, to admit the existence of the gods, 
 but rendered such an admission meaningless for 
 religion by setting the gods apart in some remote 
 sphere entirely severed from actuality, while they 
 regarded all the immediate operations of the 
 world as the effects of chance or impersonal law. 
 Practically their position was the same as that 
 of the agnostics or evolutionists of today — or 
 should we say of yesterday? — who by relegating 
 God to the Unknowable free themselves from 
 any charge of dogmatic atheism yet are able to 
 elaborate a mechanistic theory of the universe 
 untrammeled by the interference of a known 
 deity. They acknowledge a God, but by re- 
 jecting Providence deprive the word of any 
 human significance. Such philosophers might be 
 
PROVIDENCE AND JUSTICE 139 
 
 called semi-atheists, and it is against these rather 
 than the professed atheists that the strength of 
 Plato's reasoning is directed.^ 
 
 Now it is easy to say, in a loose general fashion, 
 that a God of goodness will not leave the work 
 of his hands iincared for ; but as soon as we try to 
 realize this care in the form of a Providence ex- 
 tending to all the daily occurrences of a man's 
 life, let us say, and of all men's lives, three great 
 obstacles start up, connected respectively with 
 difficulties of the reason, of the imagination, and 
 of our moral sense. 
 
 As for the first difficulty, reason may ask why 
 an omnipotent Creator should not have so con- 
 trived his handiwork that it would, as it were, 
 run its own course like a perfectly designed en- 
 gine ; why should it require his constant attention 
 and, to speak irreverently, tinkering? Plato's 
 answer to such a question may be gathered from 
 the Timaeus and elsewhere. God is not omnipo- 
 tent, and indeed such a term belongs to those 
 
 1 Professor Jebb, in his note on Oedipus Tyrannus 978, calls 
 attention to the statement of Favorinus (Diogenes Laertius, Plat. 
 §24 to the effect that Plato Trpwro? Iv <f>Lko(To<f>t.a . . . wvofiaae 
 . . . deov Trpovoiav. The note continues: "Bentley takes this to 
 mean that Plato was the first to use irpovoia of divine providence 
 (not merely of human forethought). . . . [But] the Stoics, not 
 Plato, first used irpovoia, without further qualification, of a divine 
 providence. . . . The meaning of Favorinus was that Plato first 
 established in philosophy the conception of a divine providence, 
 though popular language had known such a phrase before." 
 
140 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 metaphysical abstractions which have no place in 
 religion or in true philosophy. Nor is creation 
 an act of evoking something out of nothing, an 
 act complete and definitive in itself and depend- 
 ing solely on the will of the Creator; it is rather 
 the approximate and continuous subjection to law 
 and order of a subsisting chaos which never suc- 
 cumbs perfectly to restraint and never entirely 
 yields up its own spasmodic impulse. Such is 
 the phenomenal world whereinto the souls of 
 men are born, each with his own little world of 
 chaos within himself to regulate and subdue. 
 Rationally considered, Providence is an integral 
 part of the Platonic dualism, needing no such 
 defense as is demanded to justify its inclusion 
 in a theological or metaphysical monism. 
 
 The real difficulty in the way of Providence 
 is not raised, for the Platonist at least, by the 
 reason, but first of all by the imagination. It is 
 the very grandeur of the theory that militates 
 against a practical faith. We picture God as 
 sitting afar off in splendid isolation, uttering his 
 decrees that run like thunder through the infinite 
 ways of space; and to think of him at the same 
 time as present in the streets of our cities and 
 walking beside us as we go about our daily busi- 
 ness, is an impiety, if not an impossibility.^ Our 
 
 2 It is a popular error to think of this difficulty as first raised 
 by the Copernican astronomy, whereas in fact it was already acute 
 
PROVIDENCE AND JUSTICE 141 
 
 spiritual vision is irredeemably spacial. It is tem- 
 poral also, and we shrink back appalled at the 
 idea of a mind that can embrace consciously at 
 one and the same time so vast a complexity of 
 ever-changing events. It was this diffidence of 
 the imagination which led certain of the Stoics to 
 say that "the gods care for great things, but 
 neglect the little," a saying which we have pre- 
 served in our legal maxim, De minimis non curat 
 
 Of the same order is the doubt forced upon us 
 by the sense of isolation that is a part of our per- 
 sonal consciousness. Not in Plato's day only but 
 always our scepticism towards Providence has 
 sprung in large measure from a kind of terror 
 of vanity that invades the soul when we reflect 
 on our unimportance in a society of beings each 
 centred in its own destiny. Dr. Johnson, with 
 his customary skill in lending gravity to the com- 
 mon-places of experience, has laid his finger un- 
 
 under the old system. It makes little difference to the imagina- 
 tion, when the problem is rightly conceived, whether Providence 
 is concerned with one world of men or with many worlds of 
 animate beings. See Aubrey de Vere's poem on Copernicus. 
 
 3 Cicero, De Nat. Deor. ii, 167: Magna di curant, parva ne- 
 glegunt. Euripides had said the same thing: Twi' ayav yap aTrTcrai 
 ^eos, TO, fxiKpa 8' €ts TV)(r]V aii>el<; id. The thought becomes com- 
 mon. See, e.g., the discussion in Epictetus I, xii, 1, and the fanci- 
 ful, half Christian half pagan, use of the idea by Synesius, De 
 Providentia I, 10 and 11. 
 
142 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 erringly on the emotion that at times must over- 
 take all men : 
 
 "The truth is that no man is much regarded 
 by the rest of the world. He that considers how 
 httle he dwells upon the condition of others, will 
 learn how little the attention of others is attracted 
 by himself. While we see multitudes passing 
 before us, of whom, perhaps, not one appears to 
 deserve our notice or excite our sympathy, we 
 should remember that we likewise are lost in the 
 same throng, that the eye which happens to 
 glance upon us is turned in a moment on him 
 that follows us, and that the utmost which we 
 can reasonably hope or fear is to fill a vacant 
 hour with prattle and be forgotten."* 
 
 It is not only our personal vanity that is hurt 
 by such a reflection, but, it may be, our religion 
 also. If the sum of life is to fill a vacant hour 
 and be forgotten, where is the kindly hand of 
 Providence? When, perceiving the indifference 
 of our fellow men and shuddering perhaps at our 
 own inability even to grasp the reahty of so vast 
 a horde of self-centred individuals, we sink back 
 into the loneHness of our soul, then the spiritual 
 imagination is paralysed and inevitably we extend 
 this sense of neglect into whatever regions are 
 open to the thought of consciousness. As we 
 learn that personality among men means separa- 
 
 4 Rambler 159. 
 
PROVIDENCE AND JUSTICE 143 
 
 tion, it becomes extremely difficult to realize in 
 the mind such a divine person as is demanded by 
 the idea of Providence. "What is man that thou 
 art mindful of him, and the son of man that thou 
 visitest him?" Plato's reply to these difficulties 
 is to point to the magnificence of the divine order 
 that keeps the stars in their courses and forbids 
 the sun to grow weary, its marvellous scope and 
 unremitting diligence, and then to ask on what 
 ground we believe that such a power would over- 
 look or in any wise neglect the details of govern- 
 ment. Would it be through ignorance ? No, not 
 through ignorance. Would it be from effeminate 
 slackness ? No, certainly not from that. Would 
 it be because he knows that he has no reason to 
 attend to such things? And again the answer 
 must be no; for not even among men would a 
 wise physician or husbandman or statesman be 
 commendable on such a basis. "Neither let us 
 suppose that God, the most wise, being willing 
 and having the power to attend, heeds the great 
 things, but neglects those little things which are 
 the more easily heeded, like some feckless and 
 lazy artificer who grows slack over his toil." 
 
 Plato's argument, judged superficially by its 
 terms, may sound merely quaint and antiquated 
 in modern ears; but I suspect that, rightly un- 
 derstood, it reaches far down into the heart of 
 the matter. It is an appeal at once to the reason 
 
144 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 to clarify itself and to the imagination to lift 
 itself to a truer vision of the nature of God, 
 whose greatness is measured, not by a kind of iso- 
 lated imiversality, but by his power of compre- 
 hending endless details and of being present with 
 each while still grasping the whole. And the ob- 
 stacle raised by our moral sense Plato will meet 
 in much the same way. The question itself is 
 one that has troubled many minds, and has not 
 grown old with time : how shall we reconcile faith 
 in the watchful government of a just and mighty 
 God with the apparent injustices of human des- 
 tiny? "The fortunes of evil and unjust men," 
 Plato says, the spectacle of "wicked old men 
 reaching their term of years and leaving their 
 children's children in the highest honours," these 
 are the things that drive a reflective mind to 
 doubt the reality of Providence. So Job asked: 
 "Wherefore do the wicked live, become old, yea, 
 are mighty in power?" Ennius states the matter 
 bluntly, in good Roman fashion: 
 
 Ego deum genus esse semper dixi et dicam caelitum, 
 Sed eos non curare opinor quid agat humanum genus; 
 Nam si curent, bene bonis sit, male malis, quod nunc 
 abest. 
 
 Plutarch will compose one of his subtlest es- 
 says, De Sera Numinis Vindicta, to explain 
 
PROVIDENCE AND JUSTICE 145 
 
 away the paradox, and a whole Hterature of 
 apology, following the model of the Chaeronean 
 Platonist, will grow up among Christian theo- 
 logians. But there is no need to multiply exam- 
 ples ; the question has arisen wherever and when- 
 ever men begin to consider "the ways of God to 
 man" in the light of their own sense of justice 
 and moral right. Our business is with the theolo- 
 gy of the Laws, which offers the first serious 
 theodicy of the western world and, I hazard the 
 statement, still the most satisfactory. 
 
 Plato opens his argument with what he calls 
 a kind of mythical charm for the incensed soul: 
 
 "Let us persuade the young man, if words may 
 avail, that all things have been ordered by God, 
 who has the world in care, to the salvation and 
 virtue of the whole, each member passively and 
 actively contributing its part according to its 
 abihty. Over this multiform world rulers have 
 been set to govern sectionally down to the small- 
 est detail of what must be suffered and done, to 
 the end that each section may be brought to its ap- 
 pointed consummation. Of this system, O 
 wretched man, thou art a single part, which looks 
 to the whole and tends to that, though in itself 
 of the least magnitude ; yet it has not occurred to 
 thee that in such a system every part of creation 
 has its birth to the end that the life and being of 
 the whole may enjoy happiness, not the whole for 
 thee, but thou for it. ... But thou art vexed, not 
 
146 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 understanding how that which happens to thee 
 is best for the whole and for thee, so far as the 
 common creation permits." 
 
 This is the famous paradox of the whole and 
 the part which will play so important a role in 
 the philosopliies of the Stoic, the Deist, the im- 
 perfect Christian, and, one may add, the modern 
 man of science; and if Plato had stopped here it 
 would be hard to rescue him from the charge of 
 that shallow optimism which virtually denies the 
 existence of anything intrinsically wrong or 
 odious in the world. We might, of course, as a 
 corrective, point to the numerous passages in 
 which Plato gives expression to his belief in the 
 very insistent fact of evil, and indeed no one can 
 read much in the Dialogues without feeling 
 that their tendency is rather to over-emphasize 
 Republic 379c*^^^^ ^^ minimizc this reality: "For us," he says, 
 "evils abound far more than good." But such 
 a correction, taken alone, would still leave him 
 open to the same accusation of fundamental in- 
 consistency which was brought against the Stoics 
 for teaching in their physics that whatever is is 
 right, while in their ethics they bemoan the con- 
 dition of human life as a state of misery and evil. 
 Plato's escape from this inconsistency is hinted at 
 in the last clause of the passage quoted: "so far 
 as the common creation permits." Now, in them- 
 selves, these words might be used by a Stoic, 
 
PROVIDENCE AND JUSTICE 147 
 
 but with a different implication. The Stoic, as 
 an avowed nionist and determinist, for whom 
 God is the cause of all things that are, would 
 understand them to mean simply that men as 
 mere fragments of the whole must have the in- 
 completeness of fragments; he would not admit 
 that this incompleteness of the separate parts im- 
 ports any taint of evil or even of imperfection 
 into the system as a whole. But, however Plato 
 may seem, in this passage torn from its context, 
 to be indulging in the same sort of logomachy, it 
 must be remembered that he is not a monist and 
 never for a moment holds that God is the deter- 
 mining cause of all things. On the contrary, 
 after his statement in The Republic of the super- 
 abundance of evils in our life, he adds that "God 
 and no other must be held the cause of what good 
 we enjoy, whereas for the evils other causes must 
 be sought, and not God." The same idea occurs 
 elsewhere in the Dialogues, and in the Timaeus 
 it is made the text for an elaborate fable of crea- 
 tion. 
 
 Plato's theory, which combines the recognition 
 of evil with a perception of the world's harmo- 
 nious structure and finds a place for Providence, 
 would then be something like this. There are 
 sources of good and evil in the soul, and as soul 
 permeates all and governs all, there must be both 
 good and evil in the heavens as in all the other 
 
148 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 operations of the phenomenal world. He will 
 even say that "the heavens are filled with powers 
 of good many in number, and with contrary 
 powers more numerous still than the good"; but 
 he is speaking here of the heavens as part of the 
 scene of human life and of the "deathless battle" 
 in which mankind is engaged. When he forgets 
 our mortal stress, and regards the splendour of 
 the spheres alone in their matchless ordering, 
 then the thought of evil ahiiost drops from his 
 mind, and the reaches of the sky become for him 
 a place very good, where the gods are wheeling 
 above us in their shining chariots. That is to say, 
 in less figurative language, the physical universe 
 in its large and general aspect appears to be a 
 realm of law and regularity, and this adjustment 
 of parts into one harmonious system is for its 
 own end.' To rearrange the whole, or any parts 
 of the whole, so as to mete out physical justice 
 to every human soul as it chooses to live its life 
 would throw the cosmos into chaos. If this un- 
 thinkable rearrangement were the only course 
 open to the judge and creator the result would 
 be a terrible discord between nature as a sphere 
 
 5 In its general aspect. Plato is aware that the regularity of 
 physical law is after all only approximate. This is true in as- 
 tronomy, as he expressly declares in The Republic 529c ff; and 
 the central myth of the Politicus shows that a narrower inspec- 
 tion discovers a principle of disorganization {ovjX(f)VTO<i iTnOvfiia) 
 in the physical world never fully subdued. 
 
PROVIDENCE AND JUSTICE 149 
 
 of impersonal order and nature as the environ- 
 ment of free spontaneous souls; physical law 
 would mean moral anarchy. And this in fact is 
 the conclusion of those who, seeing only the pres- 
 ent, deny the efficacy of Providence. But there 
 is another course open to the divine ruler, and the 
 present is not all. If it is impossible to recast 
 the world to suit the moral needs of each soul, it 
 is possible to change the place of the soul in the 
 world in such a manner that its environment and 
 the accidents of its existence shall be fitted to 
 the demands of justice. Again, if the observed 
 facts of life do not seem to correspond with such 
 a procedure, it is because we know the soul only 
 in its present stage. But the soul does not come 
 into existence at a moment of time and pass out 
 of existence at another moment of time; as it 
 shall continue to exist after death, so it existed 
 before birth, and this life that we know is only 
 one in a long, perhaps an infinite, chain of hves. 
 At each birth the soul is assigned to a body and 
 placed amid surromidings which are at once the 
 award of its acts in a preceding life and the most 
 suitable gymnasium to train it for a succeeding 
 life. God, Plato says, "has contrived that each 
 member of the living world should be so placed as 
 most easily and effectively to render virtue vic- 
 torious and vice defeated. To this end he has 
 contrived that the character developed by us 
 
150 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 should determine the character of our seat and 
 the place occupied by us at any time; but the 
 development of our particular character he has 
 left to the will of each of us. As a man desires 
 and as is the character of his soul, such and in 
 such manner, for the most part, each of us is 
 born."° This, roughly sketched, is the dogma 
 of transmigration or metempsychosis, by which 
 Plato would explain the apparent injustices of 
 life and confirm the behef in Providence. 
 
 In the preamble of the Laws, where the inten- 
 
 6 Plato's theodicy by means of metempsychosis is like that of the 
 Hindus save in one important point. The Hindus eliminated the 
 question of creation altogether, and thought of the soul as caught 
 in a sams&ra, or cycle of existences (cf. the Orphic kvkAos t^s 
 ycreVcws, 6 tj/? fioipas r/aoxo's), without beginning. Plato, hav- 
 ing the idea of a creator in mind, taught {Timaetis 41e) that the 
 souls all came from his hands equal in power and endued with 
 equal knowledge, so that in the divergency of their future careers 
 they would not reproach their maker if one fell behind the other. 
 But the question is inevitable: why, if they were created in every 
 way equal and started with no innate difference of disposition, 
 should one soul choose righteousness for its portion and another 
 evil? Origen fell into the same difficulties by connecting the 
 theory of metempsychosis with the act of creation; the Christian, 
 indeed, by the nature of his premises, could not escape this in- 
 consistency. To Plato it was open to consider the soul as without 
 beginning; and in fact this idea is really implied in his theory 
 of creation, since the soul-stuff is not created by God e.v nihilo 
 but has its own existence. And the argument from the conserva- 
 tion of energy in the Phaedo and in The Republic 611a shows that 
 Plato really regarded the individual souls as without beginning 
 as they are without end. 
 
PROVIDENCE AND JUSTICE 151 
 
 tion is mainly theological, Plato deals with the 
 dogma rationalistically, as it touches on the be- 
 ing of God and the reality of Providence; but 
 elsewhere he treats the subject more mythologic- 
 ally, more, that is to say, from the human side. 
 Particularly at the close of The Republic, in the 
 story of Er the Pamphylian, he draws it out into 
 a splendid allegory of the soul's progress. This 
 Er, it is related, was slain in battle, but on the 
 twelfth day, as he was Ij^ing on the funeral pyre, 
 returned to life, and told a marvellous tale of 
 what he had seen and heard in the other world. 
 Of his journey to the mysterious tribunal of the 
 gods and the judgment there pronounced on the 
 souls of the dead, of the penalties endured by the 
 evil in the nether regions and the blessings en- 
 joyed by the righteous in the celestial sphere, 
 we say nothing, except to note that Plato, like 
 the Hindus, combines in his account the rather in- 
 compatible theories of satisfactory awards in 
 heaven and hell and of a rebirth in accord with the 
 soul's previous deeds. In both cases, Greek and 
 Hindu, we have apparently a philosophical con- 
 ception of good and evil as working themselves 
 out in life by their own gravity, so to speak, 
 superimposed on a more popular mythology.^ 
 
 ■? The two conceptions are reconciled in a manner by the pos- 
 sibility of the soul's escape from the cycle of rebirths into a 
 heaven of endless philosophic repose (placed by Timaeus 42b 
 
152 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 However that may be, after a period of a thou- 
 sand years the disembodied souls — all save a few 
 whose evil is incurable or, as we gather elsewhere, 
 who have transcended mortal bonds by the per- 
 fection of philosophy — return to the place of 
 tribunal, and from there, after a few days, pro- 
 ceed to a still more mysterious spot at the centre 
 of space, where the three Fates sit at the spindle 
 of Necessity, revolving with their hands the 
 whorl in which move the sun and moon and earth 
 and planets, and presiding over the transit from 
 the world of death to the world of life. 
 
 Here a prophet, as Er relates the story, first 
 ari'anged the newcomers in order; then he took 
 from the lap of Lachesis lots and samples of 
 lives, and, having mounted a high pulpit, spoke 
 as follows: "Hear the word of Lachesis, the 
 daughter of Necessity. Mortal souls, behold a 
 new cycle of life and mortality. Your daemon 
 will not be allotted to you, but you will choose 
 your daemon ; and let him who draws the first lot 
 have the first choice, and the life which he chooses 
 shall be his destiny. Virtue is free, and as a man 
 honours or dishonours her he will have more or 
 less of her ; the responsibility is with the chooser — 
 
 figuratively in the stars from which the souls began their mortal 
 existence, but in other dialogues otherwise conceived), and by 
 the punishment of an endless hell for those who fall into incurable 
 evil. 
 
PROVIDENCE AND JUSTICE 153 
 
 God is not responsible." When the interpreter 
 had thus spoken, he scattered lots indifferently 
 among them all, and each of them took np the lot 
 which fell near him, all but Er himself (he was 
 not allowed ) , and each as he took his lot per- 
 ceived the number which he had obtained. Then 
 the interpreter placed on the ground before them 
 samples of lives ; and there were many more lives 
 than the souls present, and they were of all sorts. 
 And here is the supreme peril of our human state, 
 and to this end each one of us should leave every 
 other kind of knowledge and seek and follow 
 one thing only, if peradventure he may be able 
 to learn and discern between good and evil, and so 
 to prepare himself to choose always the better 
 life when the opportunity comes. 
 
 Now the spectacle before Er was most curious, 
 — sad and laughable and strange. He who had 
 the first choice came forward and in a moment 
 chose the greatest tyranny ; his mind having been 
 darkened by folly and sensuality, he had not 
 thought out the whole matter before he chose, and 
 did not at first perceive that he was fated, among 
 other evils, to devour his own children. But when 
 he had time to reflect, and saw what was in the 
 lot, he began to beat his breast and lament over 
 his choice, forgetting the proclamation of the 
 prophet; for, instead of blaming himself, he ac- 
 cused chance and the gods, and everything rather 
 
154^ THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 than himself. Strange and manifold were the 
 other choices, mostly foolish and with little wis- 
 dom. Of all that Er beheld onlj^ Odysseus, whose 
 lot happened to be the last, took time for delib- 
 eration and found what he desired and what had 
 been neglected by everybody else. 
 
 So, having chosen, the souls passed on to the 
 Fates, who ratified the destiny of each, and 
 thence through a scorching heat to the plain of 
 Forgetfulness and the river of Unmindfulness. 
 And when they had drunk a portion of the water 
 of this river and had gone to sleep, there came a 
 thunderstorm and an earthquake, and then in an 
 instant they were driven upwards in all manner 
 of ways to their birth, like shooting stars.® 
 
 Such is Plato's fullest account of the dogma of 
 transmigration. It will sound strange to our 
 modern ears, accustomed as we are to a very dif- 
 ferent order of ideas, and the first question to 
 arise will touch its credibility. The answer, if 
 we pause at all for an answer, will depend on 
 several considerations: the source of the dogma 
 and the extent of its acceptance, the personal im- 
 mortality of the soul, the meaning of retribution 
 and purification, the reasonableness of the op- 
 posed belief in a static heaven and hell, the 
 seriousness with which Plato himself held the 
 dogma, and the function of mythology. 
 
 8 This story of Er is abridged, with some alterations of lan- 
 guage, from the translation by Jowett. 
 
PROVIDENCE AND JUSTICE 155 
 
 Now in regard to the first of these considera- 
 tions, I have said, and may need to repeat, that 
 the purpose of this work is not to investigate 
 sources, nor even to mention them, except in so 
 far as they may be essential to an understanding 
 of the matter in hand. Apparently the doctrine 
 of transmigration came to Plato, directly or 
 through the mediation of Socrates, from the 
 school of Pythagoras, and from the Orphic and 
 Dionysiac worship which was spreading over 
 Greece and profoundly modifying the older 
 forms of religion. In itself this derivation, 
 whether correct or not, would have little signifi- 
 cance for us, were not the question of credibihty 
 affected thereby. One of Plato's arguments for 
 the existence of God is the universality of such a 
 faith, as indeed always his appeal is to what 
 proves at last to be the deeper common-sense 
 of mankind;^ and so, in the case of such a 
 dogma as that now questioned, it is important to 
 know that it was not the invention of a solitary 
 thinker, however great his insight and authority, 
 but grew out of the religious sense of a highly 
 
 9 For example, in the Oorgias (474a) Socrates, for support of 
 the paradox that it is better to suffer punishment for wrong- 
 doing than to go unpunished, appeals to the individual insight of 
 Polus against the commonly expressed opinion of the world; but 
 in the end it turns out that he is summoning as a witness not the 
 sense of Polus alone but the deeper common-sense of all man- 
 kind against their more superficial views. 
 
156 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 civilized people. The argument is strengthened 
 if to Greece we add the Egj^ptians" and the Hin- 
 dus and all that vast section of the East which 
 has taken its religion from India. Metempsy- 
 chosis, whatever may be said of it otherwise, is 
 not an eccentric or ephemeral belief, but has been, 
 and still is, accepted implicitly by a large and 
 deeply reflective portion of mankind. ^^ 
 
 As for the second consideration, it is evident 
 that transmigration implies the continuance of 
 the soul after death, and in fact it is in this theo- 
 logical tractate of the Laws that Plato develops 
 his final argument for immortality, which we dis- 
 cussed in the third chapter of this work. But, so 
 far at least as the dogma is emploj^ed as a the- 
 odicy, or justification of Providence, it must im- 
 ply also, I think, immortality of a personal sort 
 and a continuance of consciousness bj^ memory. 
 Buddha, it is true, taught the doctrine of Karma, 
 while refusing to consider the question of a per- 
 sonal entity ; yet it is also true that part of the en- 
 lightenment of the Buddha himself consisted in 
 a recovery of the memory of all his past exist- 
 
 10 According to Herodotus (ii, 123) the doctrine of transmigra- 
 tion came to Greece from Egypt, but tlie statement, I believe, is 
 discredited by modern Egyptologists. 
 
 11 Only the other day, talking with an enlightened and highly 
 educated Hindu, I asked whether the men of his class still held 
 to the ancient doctrine of samsdra. His reply was unhesitating 
 and emphatic that this was the one thing thej- never doubted. 
 
PROVIDENCE AND JUSTICE 157 
 
 ences. Those who have read the Jdfaka Tales 
 will know how important this fact was to the 
 religious life of the early community. And how- 
 ever resolutely Buddha waived the abstract ques- 
 tion, this recovery of memory shows that prac- 
 tically something corresponding to our notion of 
 personal consciousness was believed to pass on 
 from birth to birth. Plato's position is much 
 the same. However dim our present memory 
 may be of a former existence, however deep the 
 draught of forgetfulness may be which the soul 
 was obliged to take before its transit from the 
 other world to this Meadow of Calamities, yet 
 the past is not all lost. On the contrary, the 
 whole force and moral drive of the Platonic phi- 
 losophy can be said, in a way, to depend on the 
 soul's faculty of recollection (amnesis). Only 
 by this renewal of vision have we any realization 
 of the realm of Ideas and of our kinship with the 
 gods. And though Plato nowhere states the con- 
 clusion categorically, it is not forcing his theories, 
 I think, to maintain that for him, as for Buddha, 
 there comes to the soul with its final enlighten- 
 ment a complete memory of the whole cycle of its 
 existence and a serene insight into the everlasting 
 justice of the moral law. 
 
 Meanwhile, though memory is still dumb from 
 drinking of the river of Lethe, it is possible for 
 us, by what may be termed a kind of anticipatory 
 
158 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 recollection, to shape our course here and now in 
 accordance with that law and to grow wise by 
 exjDcrience. Prosperity and affliction may checker 
 our days in such a manner that they seem to 
 make a mockery of justice; but it is not really so. 
 For we come to our birth trailing with us the 
 burden of a previous life, and in the rebuilding 
 or neglect of our character we are preparing for 
 a life to follow; our present home in the vast 
 spaces of nature is at once an award for the past 
 and a kind of gymnasium for the future, as if 
 this bondage in the body were not a prison house, 
 as the Orphic enthusiasts were wont to call it, 
 but a house of correction. Plato, we must re- 
 member, always thought of punishment as a cor- 
 rective rather than an act of vengeance; he was 
 even ready to maintain the paradox that it is 
 better to suffer the penalties of wrong-doing than 
 to go unscathed, and that a wise man who had 
 sinned would submit himself voluntarily to con- 
 demnation and pains, as we subject a diseased 
 body to the surgeon's knife. And so, in the ad- 
 venturous journey of rebirth, it is within our 
 choice to take the evils of life sullenly as God's 
 vengeance upon our errors, or to make of them a 
 school for the acquisition of wisdom and peace. 
 In this way the Platonic economy of metempsy- 
 chosis is in harmony with the Aeschylean doc- 
 trine of learning by suffering {pathei mathos). 
 
PROVIDENCE AND JUSTICE 159 
 
 And however strange the details of the theory 
 may sound in our unaccustomed ears, the prin- 
 ciple involved is intrinsically easier to accept, 
 less repellent to reason and the innate sense of 
 justice, than the belief in the eternity of a static 
 heaven and hell. A Dante may charm away our 
 repugnance by the magnificence of his poetic 
 imagery and by the depth of his moral emotions, 
 but at bottom his medieval conception of the 
 other world (superficially, but only superficially, 
 relieved by a mediating purgatory) is simply hor- 
 rible, at least to the judging reason. To compre- 
 hend its full enormity we need only peruse such 
 a work as Jeremy Taylor's Contemplation of 
 the State of Man, in which the dogma is pre- 
 sented, with the eloquence of conviction, no doubt, 
 but without the mask of poetic symbolism or al- 
 legory. "This is our case," he exclaims, "I know 
 not how we are so pleasant; we have never died, 
 we have no experience or skill in a thing of so 
 great difficulty; we are only once to die, and in 
 that all is at stake; either eternity of torments 
 in hell, or of happiness in heaven. . . . O most 
 dreadful point, which art the end of time, and 
 beginning of eternity! O most fearful instant, 
 which shuttest up the prefixed term of this life, 
 and determinest the business of our salvation; 
 how many things are to pass in thee! In the 
 same instant hfe is to finish, all our works to be 
 
160 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 examined; and that sentence given, which is to 
 be executed for all eternity. O last moment of 
 life! O first of eternity! how terrible is the 
 thought of thee!" Terrible indeed if one takes 
 literally, as the preacher meant them to be taken, 
 the picture of the soul standing at the bar of 
 judgment, and the relentless account of the 
 eternal award/^ If such a conception of the 
 future world were all, it were better, as men have 
 come to do, to thrust out of mind any thought of 
 continuance after death, or else to fall into a 
 sentimental hope of universal salvation which 
 makes a trifle of sin and a mockery of divine jus- 
 tice. Against such a dilemma we may well pause 
 to ask ourselves whether there may not be some 
 adimibration of a deeper truth in the belief in 
 transmigration which has governed the conduct 
 of the most religious people of the Orient and 
 was adopted by the wisest of occidental j)hiloso- 
 phers. 
 
 For certainly Plato accepted the dogma in all 
 seriousness. In it he thought he saw an answer 
 to those who threw up the seeming inequalities 
 of life as a pretext for denying the Providential 
 
 12 For a direct contrast between the Christian scheme with the 
 Platonic metempsychosis, see the fragment Ex Libro adversus 
 Graecos qui inscribitur Adversus Platonem, De Causa Universi, 
 attributed to Hippolytus Portuensis. The author describes the 
 undying physical torments of the damned and the eternal physical 
 joys of the blessed wth a pious and perfectly lurid realism. 
 
PROVIDENCE AND JUSTICE 161 
 
 rule of the world. And having disposed by this 
 means of the second of the three atheistical propo- 
 sitions, he was enabled to make short shrift with 
 the third proposition, of those who admitted the 
 fact of Providence, but comforted themselves by 
 hoping that the gods might be bought off from 
 justice by prayers and sacrifice. If men were 
 not responsible for tlieir own fate, if even, as the 
 Christians were to hold, the soul came straight 
 from the hands of God, with its disposition given 
 to it by the fiat of the Creator, then indeed there 
 might be some reason for relaxing the chain of 
 moral cause and effect, and for setting up the 
 mercy of God, or even his easiness of temper, 
 as a mitigation of his so-called justice; but from 
 this perplexity Plato was freed by a scheme which 
 made justice and mercy one, and he could insist 
 with unflinching rigour on the inexorability of the 
 gods. As Providence is the working of God's 
 goodness and wisdom, so his truth and immut- 
 ability are preserved by the implacable sequences 
 of the moral law. 
 
 So much can be said in fairness; nevertheless 
 there is another aspect of the question which must 
 not be entirely overlooked here, though its full 
 discussion belongs rather to another place. The 
 belief in Providence is equally Christian and 
 Platonic; but there is a difference in the emo- 
 tional use of the doctrine which goes down to the 
 
162 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 roots of the religious life, and this difference is 
 dependent, in part at least, on the connexion of 
 Providence on the one hand with the Christian 
 scheme of an eternal static judgment and on the 
 other hand with the Platonic justice of transmi- 
 gration. Now the logic of our moral sense would 
 seem to lie all on the side of justice against judg- 
 ment, yet it may still be that in these high mat- 
 ters logic is not the last word. What if the Chris- 
 tian scheme, by its very hardness and unreason- 
 ableness, should throw open the door to a divine 
 attribute of mercy to which the human heart can 
 cling as it can never quite cling to the inexorable 
 God of Plato's philosophy ? I do not know where 
 in the Dialogues of Plato we should find a place 
 for those sentences of the New Testament which 
 transcend all argument: "Come unto me, all ye 
 that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give 
 you rest," and, "Blessed are the poor in spirit, 
 for theirs is the kingdom of heaven." It must 
 be admitted that Platonism here misses certain 
 human qualities without which religion seems, 
 in our weaker hours at least, but a cold consola- 
 tion. The gods who were worshipped in the 
 Academy do not walk so closely beside us in the 
 darkness of our earthly ignorance, can never un- 
 derstand our needs, or listen so intelligently to 
 our appeals, as does the Comforter who was 
 promised to the disciples of Jesus. And in the 
 
PROVIDENCE AND JUSTICE 163 
 
 end it may turn out that the Christian dogma, or 
 myth if you prefer, lends to the idea of Provi- 
 dence a depth of meaning which is in the highest 
 degree divine, yet which reason of itself cannot 
 fathom." But this is by the way. 
 
 "And thus," Plato says at the close of Er's tale 
 of judgment and metempsychosis, "this myth is 
 saved and has not perished, and may save us, if 
 we obey it, and we shall pass over the river of 
 Forgetfulness and shall not sully our soul." In 
 like manner, at the conclusion in the Gorgias of 
 another account of the future life, he declares 
 that no doubt his words will be reckoned an idle 
 myth such as old wives tell, yet this truth at least 
 is involved in them, that it is better to suffer 
 wrong than to do wrong and that all our care 
 should be directed to being good rather than to 
 seeming. And once again, in The Republic, he 
 speaks of the usefulness of mythology in dealing 
 with matters of which we have no certain 
 knowledge and where nothing is left for us but to 
 
 13 For a philosophical treatment of the Christian view of judg- 
 ment and mercy I may refer the reader to Clement's Quis Dives 
 §§30, 40, particularly the passage in the former section beginning, 
 diw yap /wvia Swarov a(j>€aLV afMipTiwv TTapa(T\€a6aL Kat firj Ao- 
 yiaaadai TrapaTrrwfiaTa, and the passage in §40 beginning, os 
 fWVo<s T(uv aTrdvTwv otos re ioriv airpoKTa Troirjaat, ra Treirpayfieva 
 c'Ae'w Tw Trap' avTov. Profounder in its psychology and philosophy 
 is Newman's sermon on Peace and Joy amid Chastisement {Par- 
 ochial and Plain Sermons IV, viii). 
 
 382d 
 
164 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 shape our fiction as best we can to the hidden 
 truth. It is clear then that, however seriously 
 Plato took the doctrine of metempsychosis, he 
 shows by his resort to mythology that it belongs 
 to a sphere of religion very different from the 
 primary facts of philosophy; we have come a 
 long way from our starting point. 
 
 Philosophy has its own justice, discovered in 
 that law of the soul which binds together right- 
 eousness and happiness, sin and misery, as the in- 
 separable facts of our conscious being. With the 
 addition of the theological propositions of God 
 and Providence we enter into a new realm of 
 relations which demands that the apparent dis- 
 crepancies of pleasures and pains shall be brought 
 into harmony with the philosophical law of jus- 
 tice. To Plato the method that seemed to fulfil 
 these conditions for the human soul was the myth 
 of metemspychosis, and on this myth he allowed 
 his imagination to play after the manner of a 
 great poet: "the philomyth is a philosopher," as 
 Aristotle says." The truth Plato sought to make 
 real was about the same as that to which John 
 Stuart Mill came at the end of his days: "All 
 the probabilities in case of a future life are that 
 such as we have been made or have made ourselves 
 before the change, such we shall enter into the 
 life hereafter. "^^ The visualization, so to speak, 
 
 i^Metaph. I, ii, 8: Aio /cat 6 <}>i,\6fJLv9os ^tAotro<^ds rrtos coriv. 
 16 Three Essays in Beligion 211. 
 
PROVIDENCE AND JUSTICE 165 
 
 of this truth in the soul's adventure before the 
 judgment seat of the gods and its rebirth in one 
 bodily form or another, is true fiction. "To thephaedrus 24Sc 
 clever men of this world such a demonstration will 
 be incredible, to the wise it will bring its own cre- 
 dentials." 
 
 Thus, in mythology, which combines with 
 theology and philosophy to round out the re- 
 ligious life, there are two factors to be distin- 
 guished: the truth that is clothed upon by the 
 imagination, and the garment itself ; the certainty 
 of the moral law embodied and the probability of 
 the particular form of embodiment. A myth is 
 false and reprehensible in so far as it misses or 
 distorts the primary truth of philosophy and the 
 secondary truth of theology; it becomes more 
 probable and more and more indispensable to the 
 full religious life as it lends insistence and reality 
 to those truths and answers to the daily needs of 
 the soul. Perhaps the first requirement of sound 
 religion is just the due recognition of these two 
 elements in mythology, neither on the one hand 
 giving to myth the character of philosophic truth, 
 nor on the other hand carrying over to philosophy 
 the conjectural character of myth. By the for- 
 mer error faith assumes the hard rigidity of fanat- 
 icism, until doubts creep in, and then, when the 
 myth has lost its grip upon us, the whole fabric 
 of religion crumbles away together. In the sec- 
 
166 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 ond case, by seeing in philosophy nothing dif- 
 ferent in kind from the probabiHties of mytholo- 
 gy, we leave faith without any solid fomidation; 
 religion may be a useful illusion, to preserve if 
 we can, but it will speak to us without authority 
 or power. It would seem a simple matter to 
 maintain such a distinction; in practice the sim- 
 plest truths are the most difficult. 
 
 Metemspychosis is Plato's mythological treat- 
 ment of the cosmic destinies of the human soul; 
 it remains to follow him into the greater myih of 
 the cosmos itself. 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 MYTHOLOGY 
 
 TRANSLATION FROM THE TIMAEU8 
 
 In the first place, then, in my opinion we must 27d 
 distinguish these two things: What is that 
 which always is and has no becoming,^ and 
 what is that which, always becoming, never 
 
 1 Here at the outset we are met by one of those insuperable 
 difficulties which are the despair of the translator. There is no 
 verb in English which conveys the various meanings of gignomai, 
 "to become," "to be made," "to be created," "to exist," etc. Fur- 
 thermore Greek has a whole group of words connected radically 
 with gignomai, for which English has no corresponding group 
 derived from a single root. The translator is forced to make 
 what shift he can. His perplexity is increased by the fact that 
 Greek has another group of words connected with gennad, "to 
 beget," "to generate," which in their passive forms run parallel 
 with the group connected with gignomai, and can scarcely be dis- 
 tinguished in English. Thus, connected with gignomai, we have 
 genUos, meaning "created," while gennitos, connected with gen- 
 nad, means "begotten," "generated," "born." In the Timaeug 
 these two groups are used by Plato with no metaphysical distinc- 
 tion; just as (see infra) he speaks of God as the maker (poietSs) 
 and father (patSr) of the world. The Christian writers, however, 
 who draw so much of their theology from the Timaeus, will base 
 the whole fabric of orthodoxy on a distinction between the world 
 as created (genStos) by God and Christ as begotten {gennHos) 
 by God. Of all these verbal associations and distinctions English 
 can give but the roughest notion. 
 
 167 
 
168 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 28 is? The one, being always the same, we 
 comprehend by thought with reason; the other, 
 becoming and perishing, never really being, 
 we guess at by opinion with unreasoning 
 perception. Now all that becomes does so of 
 necessity by some cause ; for it is impossible that 
 anything should have generation without a cause. 
 And it follows that the creator of any object 
 who fashions its form and faculty with his eyes 
 ever set on immutability, and with the immutable 
 as his pattern, of necessity produces a fair work, 
 whatever it be; but if his eyes are set on what 
 has become and he uses this product of generation 
 as a pattern, his work is not fair. And so of the 
 whole round world ( cosmos I will call it or what- 
 soever other name will be most acceptable to it), 
 we should first consider — what lies at the begin- 
 ning of every consideration — whether it always 
 was, without any beginning in generation, or has 
 become, with its start from some beginning. It 
 has become ; for it is visible and tangible and has 
 body, and all such things are sensible, and things 
 sensible, matters of opinion and sense, are phe- 
 nomena of becoming and generation. And of 
 that which becomes we say there is a necessity that 
 it became by some cause. 
 
 No doubt it is hard to discover the maker and 
 father of the universe, and impossible, when dis- 
 covered, to express him to all men ; and here again, 
 
THE TIMAEUS 169 
 
 in regard to the world, we are confronted with 
 this consideration: after which of the patterns 
 did the builder fashion it, whether after the im- 
 mutable and unchanging, or after that which has 
 become? If then this cosmos is fair and the cre- 
 ator good, evidently he had his eyes upon the 
 eternal; but if the contrary (which is sacrilege 
 for any man to say) , then upon what has become. 
 Now it is quite clear that his eyes were upon the 
 eternal, since the world is the fairest possible 
 creation, and he is the best of causes.'' And hav- 
 ing been made thus, it was modeled upon that 
 which is comprehensible to reason and thought 
 and upon that which is immutable. Wherefore 
 also it follows quite necessarily that this cosmos 
 is an image of something. Now it is most im 
 portant that the beginning of any subject should 
 be according to nature. Hence in our distinction 
 of the image and its pattern our discourse should 
 be affiliated to those things of which it is the in- 
 terpreter. It should be stable and assured when 
 interpreting what is stable and fixed and ration- 
 ally evident (failing not of that degree of in- 
 vincible certainty which is possible and proper for 
 discourse) ; whereas when we deal with that 
 which is but a likeness and image of the immut- 
 able, our discourse in the same manner ought to 
 
 sThales had said before Plato: KaWiarov Kotrfio^, Toirjfia yap 
 Btov. 
 
 29 
 
170 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 •^ V be content to aim at Jikelihood.^ As being is to 
 ^^ becoming, so is truth to belief. If, then, amid 
 the many views that may be held of the gods and 
 the creation of the imiverse we are unable to make 
 our discourse in every way consistent with itself 
 and exact, there is no reason to wonder; rather, 
 we ought to be content if we can attain a high 
 degree of probability, remembering that I who 
 speak and you who judge have the nature of men, 
 and that it behooves us to accept of these things a 
 story or myth based on likelihood, and to look 
 for nothing beyond. 
 
 Let us then declare for what cause the author 
 of the universe constructed it. He was good,* 
 
 8 This distinction between truth, or knowledge, and belief is of 
 the first importance in the study of philosophy and religion. In 
 the great discourse on goodness and the Good which closes the 
 sixth book of The Republic and runs into the seventh book, and 
 which may be called the consummation of the Platonic philosophy, 
 Plato thought he was dealing with truths of which we have im- 
 mediate and certain knowledge. In the Timaeus, where he is 
 dealing with the same ideas mythically, he is content with a de- 
 gree of belief or conviction. His word for "belief," jriaris, will 
 be used by Christians for a "faith" which is supposed to surpass 
 the knowledge of philosophy. 
 
 **Aya&os ^v. In the conclusion of the sixth book of The Re- 
 public Plato had come very close, from a confusion of the final 
 and the efficient cause, to identifying God and the Idea of the 
 Good. Here, In his maturer thought, he distinguishes clearly be- 
 tween the two. God, as good, is the efficient cause, the Ideal world, 
 including the Good, is the final cause. Man, as we shall see, is 
 to be like God as an efficient cause in the world. 
 
THE TIMAEUS 171 
 
 and in the good there never can be envy of aught. 
 And, being free from this quahty, he desired 
 all things to be made as like to himself as pos- 
 sible.^ This is that sovereign principle of crea- 
 tion and of the cosmos which we most certainly 
 shall be right in accepting from wise men. For 30 
 God, in his desire that all things should be good 
 and that, so far as possible, there should be noth- 
 ing evil, took all that was visible as it came to 
 him, lying not in a state of rest but moving 
 without harmony or measure ; and out of disorder 
 he brought it into order, thinking such a state 
 altogether better than the other. It was not, nor 
 is it, right that the best agent should produce 
 other work than what is fairest. Accordingly, on 
 consideration, he found that of things by nature 
 visible no work lacking reason would ever be 
 fairer than one with reason,^ the whole compared 
 with the whole, and that it is impossible for rea- 
 son to accrue to anything without soul. For this 
 consideration he composed the universe by 
 
 5 Observe the recurrence of this phrase, "as possible" ; it is the 
 mark of dualism, distinguishing Plato's God from the Christian 
 God. 
 
 6 Reason, voOs, a word not easy to translate owing to its philo- 
 sophical content. It is in general the "mind," or "intelligence," 
 or even "spirit," as contrasted with sensation and the phenomenal 
 order of things; denoting rather the intuitional or idealistic 
 "reason" than the rationalistic. A little below its cognate, vo-qra., 
 is translated "of the Ideal order." 
 
172 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 fashioning reason in soul, and soul in body/ in 
 such a manner as to produce a work fairest and 
 best in nature. So at least, following the prob- 
 able account, we must say that this cosmos was 
 \ created as a creature with soul and reason,® veri- 
 tably by the providence of God. 
 
 This being settled, our next task is to say in 
 the resemblance of what creature the author of 
 the world constructed it. We will not condes- 
 cend to any of those creatures that can be classed 
 as partial (since nothing resembling the imper- 
 fect can ever be fair), but will suppose that of 
 all creatures it is most Hke that of which the other 
 creatures are individually and generically parts. 
 For the pattern embraces in itself all creatures of 
 the Ideal order, just as this cosmos embraces us 
 and all other animals that belong to the visible 
 order. And thus, desiring to render it as similar 
 as possible to the most fair and altogether per- 
 fect of the Ideal, God fashioned it as one visible 
 31 creature having within itself all creatures natur- 
 
 7 This, later, will be the Plotinian evolution of the world from 
 God to nous, to psyche, to body. But the Neoplatonic conception 
 of emanation, or evolution in this sense, is totally foreign to 
 Plato. Psychi, soul, is the whole conscious element of man. 
 
 8 For the influence of this concepton of the world as ^wov 
 efuj/vxov ewovv re in Plotinus, Origen, St. Augustine, Bruno and 
 Fechner see Inge, Christian Mysticism 29. But it 'is important to 
 note that there is no hint of pantheism in Plato. His God is 
 transcendent, not immanent. 
 
THE TIMAEUS 173 
 
 ally akin to it. You ask whether we are right in 
 calling it one universe, or should have spoken 
 more correctly of many or an infinite number? 
 One ; since it will have been created according to 
 the pattern. For that which embraces all Ideal 
 creatures could never exist as a second with an- 
 other; otherwise there would necessarily exist 
 about these two another creature of which they 
 would be part, and this world would be said more 
 properly to have been made Hke that embracing 
 creature than like the two embraced. In order, 
 then, that in the matter of unity it might be Hke 
 the perfect creature, the maker made not two 
 worlds or an infinite number of worlds, but this 
 universe exists as one only-begotten, and ever 
 shall exist. . . . 
 
 This was the design of the ever-hving God 
 concerning the god to be, by which he made it 
 smooth and even, spreading in all directions 
 equally from the centre, a whole and perfect body 
 composed of perfect bodies. And in the midst 
 thereof he set soul, extending it throughout, and 
 even enveloping the body with it round about; 
 and established the one only heaven-bounded 
 world as a sphere revolving in solitude, by reason 
 of its virtue content with its own society and 
 needing no other, known and friendly itself suf- 
 ficiently to itself. On all these accounts he begot 
 it a happy god. 
 
 34a 
 
174 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 Now God did not contrive the soul as younger 
 than body, though it appears later as we describe 
 it; for when joining them he would not have per- 
 mitted the elder to be ruled by the younger. But 
 as we lay hold of things very much by chance 
 and at random, so we speak; whereas he fash- 
 ioned soul as earlier and elder than body in birth 
 and virtue, to be the mistress and ruler of what 
 was to be ruled, fashioning it from the following 
 elements and in the following manner. From 
 the indivisible and ever immutable essence and 
 from that which becomes divisible by association 
 with bodies, from these two, the nature of the 
 Same and the nature of the Other, he mingled a 
 third form of intermediary essence, and fash- 
 ioned it in the same way between what was in- 
 divisible of them and what was divisible in bodies. 
 And taking these three he mingled them all into 
 one form, forcing the nature of the Other, though 
 hard to mix, into adaptation to the Same. And 
 having mingled the two with the essence and 
 having made one out of the three, he again di- 
 vided the whole into as many parts as was proper, 
 each part being compounded of the Same and the 
 Other and essence.^ . . 
 
 » By this allegory Plato evidently meant to indicate the dual 
 nature of the soul as akin at once to the eternal and im- 
 mutable and to the ephemeral and mutable. So far the matter 
 is clear and corresponds with the facts of consciousness. But 
 the attempts to penetrate more deeply into his supposed meaning 
 
THE TIMAEUS 175 
 
 When the composition of the soul was finished 36d 
 according to the mind of the maker, thereupon 
 he built up within it all the corporeal, and fitted 
 them together by setting centre to centre. And 
 the soul, inwoven from the centre every way out 
 to the extremity of the heaven-bounded world 
 and enveloping it round from without, so revolv- 
 ing within itself, started upon the divine begin- 
 ning of endless and rational life for all time. The 
 body of the world was made visible, but the soul 
 herself is invisible, partaking of reason and har- 
 mony, by the best of the Ideal and eternal created 37 
 the best of things begotten. Wherefore, as 
 blended from three elements, from the nature of 
 the Same and the nature of the Other and from 
 essence, and as divided and bound together in due 
 proportion, and revolving itself upon itself, when- 
 ever soul comes into contact with anything of 
 scattered essence or with anything of undivided 
 essence, a motion goes all through it, and it an- 
 nounces what things are the same and what are 
 other, and in what relation, place, manner, and 
 time each is to each and is affected by each, 
 
 — to explain rationally the nature of the bond between these two 
 elements and to define the exact status of reason, nous, as a part 
 of, or addition to, the soul — have not been illuminating. Plato 
 knew where to stop. In particular, the use of this symbolism by 
 Plotinus should have been a warning to later metaphysicians 
 against the futility of pretending to know what we do not know. 
 
176 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 whether in the mutable sphere of becoming or as 
 regards the everlasting and immutable. . . . 
 
 And when the Father who begot the world be- 
 held it in motion, as it were a living idol of the 
 eternal gods, he was delighted, and in his 
 pleasure formed the design of making it still more 
 like its pattern. Accordingly, as the pattern hap- 
 pens to be an eternal creature, he undertook to 
 perfect the universe so far as possible in the same 
 way. As I have said, the nature of the creature 
 happened to be eternal, and it was not possible 
 to accord this character in its completeness to 
 what was begotten ; but he took thought to make 
 a certain moving image of eternity, and so or- 
 dered the heaven-bounded world as to make it an 
 eternal image, moving in number, of the eternity 
 abiding in unity; and this we have named time.^° 
 
 10 For a metaphysical discussion of Plato's conception of time 
 see the notes on pages 230 and 231 of Hansel's Limits of Religious 
 Thought. But I think Plato was not considering time meta- 
 physically, and wisely so. Quid est ergo tempus, said Augustine 
 (Conf. xi, 14). Si nemo ex me quaerat, scio; si quaerenti explicate 
 velim, nescio. This is the common sense of a great philosopher. 
 In Plato's mythical account of time, I take it, he is simply ex- 
 pressing the fact of our consciousness of life in succession and 
 mutation and of our consciousness of that which changes not. 
 Vaughan was speaking as a true Platonist when he wrote: 
 "I saw Eternity the other night 
 Like a great Ring of pure and endless light. 
 
 All calm, as it was bright. 
 And round beneath it. Time in hours, days, years 
 
 Driv'n by the spheres 
 Like a vast shadow mov'd, in which the world 
 And all her train were hurl'd." 
 
THE TIMAEUS 177 
 
 For days and nights and months and years did 
 not exist before the heavens became, but their 
 genesis was contrived by him with the making 
 of the heavens. All these are portions of time, 
 and "was" and "shall be," as belonging to genesis, 
 are forms of time, which we unwittingly and 
 wrongly impute to the eternal Being. No doubt 
 we use the words "was" and "is" and "shall be," 
 yet "is" alone pertains to being, if we speak cor- 
 rectly, while "was" and "shall be" are terms that ^s 
 belong properly to the world of becoming which 
 moves in time. For these are of motion; but it 
 behooves not that which is ever immutable and 
 motionless to be becoming older or younger in 
 time, nor yet to become, nor to have become, 
 nor to be in the future, nor in general to suffer 
 anj'ihing whatsoever that belongs by becoming 
 to the moving objects of perception, — rather 
 such things are the created forms of time that 
 imitates eternity and revolves by number. . . . 
 Time, then, was created with the heaven- 
 bounded world, to the end that, being begotten 
 together, they might be dissolved together, if ever 
 there should be a dissolution of them — created 
 after the pattern of the eternal nature, to the end 
 that it might resemble this to the utmost degree 
 possible ; for the pattern exists through all etern- 
 ity, in pure being, and the image exists through 
 all time on and on, yet as generated and being 
 
178 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 and about to be. Such were the plan and pur- 
 pose of God for the generation of time, and thus, 
 , for the begetting of time, were created the sun 
 and moon and five other stars called planets, for 
 the division and preservation of the numbers of 
 time. And having made their several bodies, God 
 set them in the orbits which are the course of the 
 circle of the Other, seven stars in seven orbits. . . . 
 
 39b Up to the generation of time the work of crea- 
 
 tion took the likeness of that of which it was the 
 image, but it still remained unlike in so far as it 
 did not yet embrace within itself all creatures. 
 And this defect he now made good by moulding 
 it after the nature of the pattern. As reason 
 perceives what and what kind of forms exist in 
 the Ideal creature, such and so many forms he 
 thought this world creature also ought to have. 
 Now there are four classes : one the heavenly race 
 of gods, another winged and Hving in the air, a 
 
 ^^ third the aquatic species, and a fourth that of 
 the dry land. Accordingly, the form of the di- 
 vine race he created for the most part of fire, that 
 it might be the fairest to look upon and the most 
 shining; and likening it to the whole he made it 
 spherical, and set it in the orbit of the Same to 
 follow that which is strongest and wisest, dis- 
 tributing it about the whole circle of the firma- 
 ment, to make of heaven a true cosmos decked out 
 
THE TIMAEUS 179 
 
 in manifold beauty." And to each divine star he 
 gave two motions : the one imiform about its own 
 axis, as its thoughts are ever the same with itself 
 and upon the same things, the other in a forward 
 direction, as each is controlled by the regular 
 revolution of the Same. But in relation to the 
 other five motions'" he left them unmoved and 
 at rest, in order that each of them might enjoy 
 the highest possible excellence. For such a cause 
 were created all the fixed stars, which abide for- 
 ever as divine and eternal creatures, revolving 
 in their immutable orbits; whereas the planets 
 that wander and change their place about the 
 ecliptic, were created in the manner aforesaid.'^ 
 And the earth, our nurse, a body globed about the 
 pole stretched through it as an axis, he contrived 
 as the guardian and creator of night and day. the 
 first and eldest of all the gods that have been 
 generated within the heavens. . . . 
 
 The generation of the other divinities [dae- 
 mons] is a matter beyond our saying and know- 
 
 ^^ Koa/JLOV aAr/^u-ov ai'roj rcTTOiKiXfiei-ov €tvai Kad o\ov. 
 Elsewhere {Republic o29c) Plato calls the stars to, Iv tm 
 ovpavw TTOtKiA/xara, divine, indeed, and radiant, yet visible and 
 imperfect symbols only of the Ideal spheres, manifestations of 
 what to St. Paul was 17 7roAv7rot/ctAos ao(f>l.a tov Qeov, "the mani- 
 fold wisdom of God" (Eph. iii, 10). No English translation can 
 convey the vivid and manifold meaning of the Greek 7rotKtAo<?. 
 
 12 Backward, upward, downward, to the right, to the left. 
 
 13 See ante, 38c. 
 
180 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 ing. Here we must accept the words of those 
 who spake of old, who were the offspring of the 
 gods, as they say, and had clear knowledge of 
 their ancestors — certainly, we cannot disbelieve 
 the children of the gods, though they speak with- 
 out probable or positive demonstration, but in 
 obedience to the law we must believe their asser- 
 tion that they speak of things akin to themselves. 
 Thus, then, let us hold and repeat their account 
 of the generation of these gods." Of Earth and 
 Heaven the children were Oceanus and Tethys, 
 *^ from whom sprang Phorcys and Cronos and 
 Rhea and those with them; from Cronos and 
 Rhea sprang Zeus and Hera and all whom we 
 know as their reputed brethren, and from these 
 still other offspring. When, then, all the gods 
 had been generated, both those that move visibly 
 above and those that manifest themselves to us 
 as they desire, he that begot the universe spake 
 to them in this wise : 
 
 14 According to Oakesmith, The Religion of Plutarch 125, this 
 is "a passage charged with the most mordant irony against the 
 national religious tradition"; and so it is understood by other 
 interpreters. I do not feel the irony, and think the words are to 
 be taken quite sincerely. Compare Philebus 16c: ol /xevirakaioi, 
 KpuTTOve'i rjfiwv Kal lyyvjipio deiov oIkovvtcs ; and see Phaedrus 
 273e. Plato was ready to criticise sharply the immoral stories 
 about the gods, but it was a part of his reverence for tradition 
 to accept rather simply the gods of the pantheon as hints and 
 symbols of the divine power in the world. 
 
THE TIMAEUS 181 
 
 *'Gods of gods," the works of which I am 
 creator and father, as they were made by me, are 
 indissoluble except by my will. True it is that 
 everything bound can be loosened, yet it is the act 
 of an evil one to will the loosening of that which 
 is well fitted and in good case. Wherefore, since 
 you have been created, you are indeed not abso- 
 lutely immortal or indissoluble, yet shall you suf- 
 fer neither dissolution nor the lot of death, since 
 in my will you have a bond still greater and more 
 masterful than those wherewith you were bound 
 together when you were created. Now, there- 
 fore, pay heed to what I say and declare unto 
 you. There remain yet unbegotten three mortal 
 races, and until these are created the world will 
 be imperfect ; for it will not have within itself all 
 the creature races, as it ought to have if it is to 
 be finished and perfect. But if these were created 
 and partook of life through me, they Would be 
 equal to gods. Wherefore, to the end that they 
 may be mortal and that this universe may be 
 truly a universe, do you turn according to nature 
 to the making of the creatures, imitating my 
 power as shown in your generation. Now as to 
 the element in them worthy to be named with the 
 immortals, the divine part and the ruling guide 
 to those of them that are willing ever to follow 
 justice and you — this element it is for me to sow 
 
 15 This I take to be merely an amplified way of saying "Gods !" 
 
182 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 and hand over to you as a beginning. For the 
 rest, you shall make and beget them as creatures, 
 weaving the mortal upon the immortal, and you 
 shall cause them to grow by providing food, and 
 shall receive them back when they perish." 
 
 Thus he spake ; and again into the bowl where- 
 in before he had mingled and blended the soul 
 of the universe he poured what remained of the 
 divine elements, mingling them in the same gen- 
 eral manner, though they were no longer of the 
 same purity but of the second and the third 
 quality.'" Then, having composed the whole, he 
 divided it into souls equal in number to the stars, 
 and distributed them, one soul to each star.'' So, 
 
 16 One of the dark, but innocent, passages of Plato that gath- 
 ered volume and mischief as it was repeated by later metaphy- 
 sicians. It first recurs in one of the Epistles (ii, 312e) attributed 
 to Plato, where it is already transformed into a kind of mystifi- 
 cation in regard to the divine nature. Taken from this source, 
 it plays an immensely important part in the theosophies of the 
 second and third centuries a. d. It would be hard to say how 
 much the Christian doctrine of the Trinity owes to it. See Caesar 
 Morgan, The Trinity of Plato 43. 
 
 17 It is a question whether Plato here is thinking of portions 
 of soul-stuflf which are to be used by the star-gods in creating 
 individual souls, or of soul already individualized. In the latter 
 case the number of individual souls in the universe would be 
 equal to that of the fixed stars. In either case these souls or 
 portions of soul-stuff are not to be confused with the divine 
 souls who inform the fixed stars and are the secondary gods. 
 Archer-Hind and, apparently, Martin interpret Plato as re- 
 ferring to unindividualized portions of soul-stuff. Synesius, 
 Stewart, and Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, among others, think that 
 
THE TIMAEUS 183 
 
 mounting each as in a chariot, he displayed to 
 them the nature of the universe, and told them 
 its fated laws:^^ how that their first incarnation 
 should be ordained the same for all, in order that 
 no one might suffer disadvantage at his hands; 
 how that they must be sown in the organs of time, 
 each in that most suitable to it, and be born as the 
 most God-fearing of creatures, and how that, the 
 nature of humanity being double, the stronger 
 and better part should be the sex hereafter to be 
 called man. And he declared that, when of neces- 
 sity they had been implanted in bodies which 
 were ever undergoing addition in this part and 
 subtraction in that, there would necessarily be for 
 all of them, first a common innate faculty of 
 sense derived from inevitable affections, secondly 
 love mixed with pleasure and pain, and added 
 to these fear and wrath and all the following 
 
 Plato had in mind individual souls. I am inclined to accept the 
 latter interpretation. 
 
 18 This is the doctrine of reminiscence expressed in a mythical 
 form somewhat different from that of the Phaedrus. All that fol- 
 lows: the incarnate birth of the souls in the organs of time {i.e. 
 on the earth or one of the planets), their reception back into 
 their starry homes or their transmigration in accordance with 
 their good and evil deeds — all this is to be the work of the sec- 
 ondary gods. But through all the chance and change and ob- 
 scurity of mortal life, Plato would say, each soul retains a dim 
 recollection of its original purity as it came from the hand of 
 God, and has the power to rekindle that recollection to perfect 
 knowledge. 
 
 42 
 
184 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 train of emotions and all of a contrary nature." 
 If they mastered these passions, they should live 
 in justice, but if mastered by these, in injustice. 
 He that lived well the appointed time should 
 pass again to the home of his kindred star, there 
 to enjoy a happy and congenial life. But failing 
 this, he should be changed in his second incarna- 
 tion to the nature of a woman ; and if still in this 
 case he ceased not from wickedness, according 
 to the manner of his evil-doing he should change 
 always to some such bestial nature as resembled 
 the character born within him. Nor should he 
 rest from change and labour until, by conforming 
 to the revolution of the Same and Like within 
 him, with the help of reason he had mastered the 
 great burden that should cling about him from 
 fire and water and air and earth, a turbid and 
 
 19 With this and the corresponding passage at the close of the 
 present translation should be read Swinburne's chorus in the 
 Atalanta: 
 
 "Before the beginning of years 
 
 There came to the making of man 
 Time, with a gift of tears, 
 
 Grief, with a glass that ran; 
 Pleasure, with pain for leaven; 
 
 Summer, with flowers that fell; 
 Remembrance fallen from heaven, 
 
 And madness risen from hell; 
 Strength without hands to smite; 
 
 Love that endures for a breath: 
 Night, the shadow of light, 
 
 And life, the shadow of death.". . . 
 
THE TIMAEUS 185 
 
 irrational accretion, and so had returned to that 
 most excellent state which he had enjoyed at ^ 
 first.'° All these laws God established and pro- 
 nounced to the souls, to the end that he might 
 be guiltless of the evil hereafter incurred by any 
 of them.'^ And thereupon he sowed some of ,--^ 
 them on the earth, some on the moon, and some 
 upon the other organs of time. And after the 
 sowing he committed to the new gods the mould- 
 ing of mortal bodies, to create and rule what re- 
 mained to be added to the soul of man and all 
 that appertains to soul and body, and to govern 
 the mortal creature as fairly and well as they 
 could, in so far as it should not bring evils upon 
 itself by its own responsibility. 
 
 Now when he had given all these directions, 
 God abode in his own accustomed character. 
 And as he so abode, his children took thought of 
 their father's order and obeyed it. Taking the 
 immortal beginning of a mortal creature, in imi- 
 tation of their creator, they borrowed from the 
 cosmos portions of fire and earth and water and 
 air which were to be rendered back, and fastened 43 
 these together, not with those indissoluble bonds 
 by which they themselves were held together, but 
 by welding the masses with many rivets invisible 
 
 20 Plato has expressed the same idea more picturesquely in the 
 famous simile of Glaucus {Republic 611d). 
 
 21 For God's freedom from the responsibility for evil, compare 
 Republic 379c, 617e; Laws 900e, 904a; Theaetetus 176a, et at. 
 
186 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 for smallness. So they made individual bodies 
 out of all these, and bound the revolutions of the 
 immortal soul in a body subject to continual in- 
 flux and efflux. . . . 
 
 [Here follows "a probable account" of the re- 
 sults of this union of the mortal and the immortal, 
 with an explanation of the operation of the senses, 
 particularly vision, the noblest of them all. The 
 story continues:] 
 
 4Cc All these matters [the material elements of 
 
 sensation] belong to the auxiliary causes which 
 God uses as means to work out the idea of the 
 best so far as is possible. By the mass of men, 
 however, they are regarded not as auxiliary but as 
 primary causes of all things, as doing the work 
 of creation by cooling and heating, solidifying 
 and dissolving, and the like; though in fact they 
 are incapable of possessing any reason or mind 
 for any purpose. For it must be said that to 
 soul alone belongs the possession of reason (and 
 this is invisible, whereas fire and water and earth 
 and air are all visible bodies) ; and he who is a 
 lover of reason and knowledge must pursue first 
 the causes belonging to the rational order, and 
 secondly those that are of the order of things 
 moved by other things and so of necessity pass- 
 ing the motion along. And this course we must 
 follow: we must state both classes of causes, but 
 separatelj^ those that, woi-'king rationally, aiie 
 
THE TIMAEUS 187 
 
 creative of tilings good and fair, and those that, 
 being destitute of wisdom, produce now and again 
 an unordered work of chance. We have ah'cad}' 
 sufficiently set forth the auxiliary causes by which 
 the eyes possess their faculty ; now we must state 
 the greatest blessing which the eyes effect and for 
 which God bestowed them upon us."' / 
 
 In my judgment vision is the cause of the 47 
 greatest blessing to us, since but for the spectacle 
 of the stars and the sun and the heavens no word 
 of our present discourse about the universe would 
 have been uttered. But now the sight of day and 
 night, of the months and revolving years, the 
 equinoxes and solstices, has brought the inven- 
 tion of number, and has given us the conception 
 of time and our zest to investigate the nature of 
 the universe. From which things we have de- 
 rived philosophy, than which no greater good has 
 come or will come to mortal men as a gift of the 
 gods. This, I say, is the most blessed use of the 
 eyes. And why should we celebrate the lesser 
 
 22 There might seem to be some confusion here, since vision and 
 the eyes are not the work of God but of the secondary gods. 
 But the activity of these lower divinities is all under the com- 
 mand and direction of the supreme Father. Indeed, the dis- 
 tinction between God and the secondary gods should not be taken 
 too literally; it is merely Plato's mythological expression of the 
 inscrutable nature of the divine, as in itself perfect to the desire 
 of the imagination yet somehow involved in a creation which is 
 full of imperfection. 
 
188 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 blessings, the deprivation of which by blindness 
 even he who is no philosopher would bewail and 
 vainly lament? It is for us to declare the true 
 cause of vision, that God invented it and be- 
 stowed it upon us in order that, beholding the 
 revolutions of reason in the heavens, we might' 
 use them to the profit of the revolutions of mind 
 within ourselves, as these are akin to those, the 
 perturbed to the unperturbed, and in order that, 
 by learning and by partaking of the right course 
 of thought as displayed in nature, imitating the 
 divine circuits that know no wandering whatso- 
 ever, we might bring under control the wandering 
 circuits in ourselves. And of sound and hearing 
 there is a similar account, that they were bestowed 
 on us by the gods for a like purpose and for the 
 like reasons. For speech is ordered to this same 
 end, to which it contributes so large a part ; and 
 music, in so far as it uses vocal sound, was 
 granted for the sake of harmony; and harmony, 
 with its motions kindred to the inner revolutions 
 of the soul, is a gift of the Muses to him who 
 brings reason with him to their society, a gift 
 bestowed not for the sake of unthinking pleasure, 
 as now its use seems to be, but as an ally against 
 the discordant revolution of the soul that has 
 arisen within us, to bring it into order and into 
 concord with itself. And rhythm also was given 
 by the Muses for the same purpose, as a supple- 
 
THE TIMAEUS 189 
 
 ment for the lack of measure and grace that pre- 
 vails in most of us. 
 
 What we have said hitherto, with slight excep- 
 tions, was concerned with exhibiting the things 
 created through reason ; but we must now add to 
 our exposition the things that become out of 
 necessity. For the genesis of this cosmos is a 
 mingled birth, a concurrence of necessity and 48 
 reason; and the beginning was thus: reason got 
 control of necessity by persuading it to bring on 
 most things to their best end as they came into 
 existence; and so and in such manner, by the act 
 of necessity submitting to reasonable persuasion, 
 the universe was composed. If then we would 
 describe truly the origin of this world as it is, 
 we must consider this mixture of the errant cause 
 and the nature of its operation. That is to say, 
 we must go back, and, taking up another first 
 principle involved in the nature of things, pro- 
 ceed again from the beginning in our present 
 exposition as in our former. We must look into 
 the nature of fire and water and air and earth 
 before the genesis of the world, and into the 
 primeval state. Until now no one has ever indi- 
 cated the manner of their generation, but we talk 
 as if men knew what fire and the rest were, as- 
 suming them as the final elements, the alphabet 
 so to speak, of the universe, whereas, properly 
 
190 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 speaking, no one who reflected for a moment 
 would represent them as belonging even to the 
 class of syllables. 
 
 Our way then lies as follows : it is not our busi- 
 ness now to state the [metaphysical] first prin- 
 ciple, or principles, however the case may be, un- 
 derlying all things ; and this, if for no other rea- 
 son, because we have difficulty enough after the 
 manner of our present exposition in dealing with 
 probabilities. Therefore you must not think I 
 ought to enter upon such a discourse, nor could 
 I for my part persuade myself that I should be 
 justified in undertaking so great a task. Ac- 
 cording then to the rule laid down when we 
 started, that we should be content to aim at like- 
 lihood, I will endeavour to make my account of 
 each thing and all things probable, more prob- 
 able than any other, taking up the subject again 
 from the beginning. And so, once more with a 
 prayer to God the saviour that he may guide us 
 through a strange and unfamiliar discourse to the 
 safe opinion of probability, let us start afresh. 
 
 In beginning anew our exposition of the uni- 
 verse we must distinguish more broadly than be- 
 fore. Then we made a double classification, but 
 now we must indicate a third class. For our 
 former argument the two kinds were sufficient, 
 one the hypothesis of a pattern, belonging to the 
 realm of intelligible and immutable being, the 
 
50 
 
 THE TIMAEUS 191 
 
 other an imitation of the pattern, created and 49 
 visible. We did not then distinguish a third kind, 
 deeming the two would be sufficient; but now our 
 argument seems to force upon us a dim and dif- 
 ficult kind which we must try to bring before you. 
 What function, then, and natia-e should be at- 
 tributed to it? This, I suppose, that it is the re- 
 ceptacle and as it were nurse of all creation. . . . 
 But we must endeavour to give a clearer ac- 
 count of the matter. Suppose a man were to 
 mould all kinds of shapes out of gold, continually 
 changing one shape into another; then suppose 
 we should point to one of these and ask him what 
 it was. Far the safest and truest answer for 
 him would be to say that it was gold, and not to 
 speak of the triangle or any other shape into 
 w^hich he had moulded it as of a thing really be- 
 ing, since these shapes are changing even while 
 he names them; and he should be content if an 
 object can be called such or such [rather than 
 actually this or that]. Now the same account 
 holds good of the nature that admits all sorts of 
 corporeal forms. It must itself be spoken of as 
 always the same ; for it does not in the least de- 
 part from its own function — rather it admits all 
 things without ever itself in any way merging 
 into a form like any of those that enter into it. 
 As the natural recipient of any impression it 
 lies there, moved and transfigured by the enter- 
 
192 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 ing forms and appearing always different be- 
 cause of these ; but the forms that enter and pass 
 out are imitations of the eternal realities, copied 
 from them in a manner wonderful and hard to 
 explain, which we shall consider at another time. 
 For the present at least we need only bear in 
 mind the three kinds: that which becomes, that 
 in which it becomes, and that from which the be- 
 coming takes its likeness. Further, we may liken 
 the recipient to a mother, that from which to a 
 father, and the nature between these to a child; 
 and we may understand that, if there is to be a 
 copying such as to present every variety of ap- 
 pearance, the recipient in which the copy arises 
 cannot be rightly constituted unless it is itself 
 without any of those forms it is to receive from 
 without. . . . 
 SI Therefore the mother and receptacle of this 
 
 visible and otherwise perceptible world of crea- 
 tion we will call neither earth nor air nor fire nor 
 water, neither anything created out of these nor 
 anything from which these are created; but shall 
 not err if we call it a separate kind, invisible and 
 formless, all-receiving, and in some most extra- 
 ordinary manner partaking of the Ideal and in- 
 telligible, itself utterly incomprehensible. So far 
 as we can arrive at its nature from our preceding 
 arguments, the best way to speak of it would be 
 this: that part of it which at any time is enkin- 
 
THE TIMAEUS 193 
 
 died appears as fire, that which is liquified as 
 water, and as earth and air when it receives the 
 Jikeness of these. 
 
 But we must go further in our analysis of this 
 matter. We must ask ourselves whether there is 
 such a thing also as fire in itself, that is to say 
 the Idea of fire, and so of the other things of 
 which we are in the habit of predicating absolute 
 existence; or are these objects which we perceive 
 with the eyes and with the other bodily organs 
 alone existent and the only reahty, and is there 
 nothing in any way existent beyond? Do we 
 merely deceive ourselves when we speak of the 
 intelligible Idea of anything as really existent, 
 since it is no more than a conception of the mind 
 or a fashion of speech ? Now our dilemma is that 
 we cannot leave the present question un judged 
 and undecided, merely affirming positively that 
 Ideas do exist, nor can we add another long ex- 
 cursus to an argument already too long. If any 
 definition should occur to me, broadly inclusive 
 yet briefly expressed, it would be most oppor- 
 tune for our purpose; and in lieu of such I pro- 
 pose my own conviction as follows : If intuition^^ 
 and true opinion are two things different in kind, 
 then do the unchangeable Ideas surely exist as 
 objects of intuition alone, not perceptible by our 
 
 23 The Greek word is nous. A few lines below the Greek for 
 "reason" is logos. 
 
194 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 senses ; but if, as some hold, true opinion differs in 
 nothing from intuition, then all we perceive by 
 our bodily organs must be regarded as having the 
 most real existence. Now we must declare them 
 to be of two kinds, since their origin is different 
 and their nature unlike. One of them arises in us 
 by instruction, the other by persuasion; one is 
 always associated with true reason, the other is 
 irrational; one is not movable by persuasion, the 
 other can be changed by persuasion; of true 
 opinion every man may be said to partake, but 
 intuition is the portion of the gods and of a 
 small number of men. If what I say is correct, 
 52 then we must admit there is first the kind of being 
 that exists immutably, unbegotten and imper- 
 ishable, neither receiving into itself anything else 
 from without nor itself passing into anything 
 else, but invisible and altogether imperceptible to 
 the senses, that kind of being which we contem- 
 plate with the reason. And there is a second 
 kind, of the same name as the first and similar 
 to it, perceptible, begotten, forever in motion, 
 becoming in a certain place and again perishing 
 thence, comprehensible by opinion with the aid of 
 perception. And there is still a third kind, that 
 of everlasting space, which suffers no destruc- 
 tion but offers a place for the genesis of all 
 things, itself palpable to a certain sort of bastard 
 reasoning without true perception, a matter of 
 
THE TIMAEUS 195 
 
 belief and scarcely that. It is because our gaze 
 is turned to this third kind that we say, as if in a 
 state of dreaming, that everything which is must 
 necessarily be in some place and occupy some 
 space, that what is not on the earth or somewhere 
 in the heavens is nothing. All these notions and 
 others of like sort we transfer to the nature of 
 that which truly is and sleeps not, being unable 
 because of our dream-state to arouse ourselves to 
 the true distinction; for we ought to say that as 
 an image has no existence in its own right but is 
 merely the moving phantasm of something else, 
 so it properly comes to existence in something 
 else, clinging to being as it may, if it is to be at 
 all; whereas for the confirmation of that which 
 really is we have this exact and true reason, that 
 so long as there is a final distinction between two 
 things one of them cannot come into existence in 
 the other in such a way that the same thing shall 
 be at once one and two. 
 
 [Here follows an account of the creation and 
 properties of the four elements, earth, water, air, 
 and fire : how, by means of the imposition of geo- 
 metrical forms upon the unformed and ever rest- 
 lessly moving substratum, there is evoked out of 
 chaos a material cosmos, ordered and law-abiding 
 and beneficent in so far as the goodness of God 
 prevails by persuasion over what in its own na- 
 ture is intractable and lawless.] 
 
196 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 ^^^ Such then was the nature of all these products 
 
 of necessity, and as such the creator of what 
 should be fairest and best in the realm of becom- 
 ing took them when he begot the self-sufficient 
 and most perfect god [i.e. the heaven-bounded 
 world], using the causes at work in them as his 
 servants, but himself contriving the end of good- 
 ness in all things created. Wherefore we must 
 discriminate between two kinds of cause, the one 
 of necessity, the other divine: and the divine 
 cause we must seek in all things, to the end that 
 
 69 we may possess a happy life so far as our nature 
 permits; and the necessary cause for the sake of 
 the divine, reflecting that otherwise we cannot 
 apprehend by themselves those truths which are 
 the object of our serious study, nor grasp them or 
 in any other way partake of them. . . . As then 
 we said in the beginning, God, taking these things 
 in their disorder, introduced proportions into each 
 to the end that so far as possible they might be 
 analogous and proportionate in themselves and to 
 one another. For hitherto they had had no share 
 in these quahties, except by chance, nor did they 
 have any claim to the names we now give them, 
 viz. fire and water and the rest; but first he 
 brought all these things into orderly existence, 
 and then out of them composed the universe as 
 one creature having within itself all creatures 
 mortal and immortal. He himself is the creator 
 
THE TIMAEUS 19T 
 
 of the divine, but the creation of the mortal he 
 laid upon his offspring to accomplish. And they, 
 in imitation of his act, took from him the im- 
 mortal element of the soul, and then fashioned 
 about it a mortal body, and gave her all the body 
 as a vehicle; and in it they framed also another 
 kind of soul, which is mortal, having in itself 
 dreadful and compelling passions — pleasure first, 
 the greatest incitement to evil, then pains that 
 frighten away good, and besides these confidence 
 and fear, witless counsellors both, and wrath 
 hard to appease, and alluring hope. Having 
 mingled these with irrational sensation and with 
 love that stops at nothing, they composed as they 
 could the mortal soul of man. 
 
 [The remainder of the dialogue deals in more 
 detail with the creation of the mortal elements of 
 the soul and with the fashioning of the body. It 
 contains also a discussion of health and disease, 
 and a brief consideration of the rules for an har- 
 monious development of this union of soul and 
 body which conditions our present life.] 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 MYTHOLOGY: THE CREATION 
 
 If we have been right in our interpretation, 
 Plato's philosophy grows out of a sense of dual- 
 ism as the central fact of man's ethical experience. 
 
 625e As he says in the first book of the Laws, all cities 
 are by nature in a state of continual warfare with 
 all other cities, and this warfare extends to the 
 citizens of the same city, and further to the in- 
 
 626e ternal life of the individual man. "And that is 
 the first and greatest victory when a man is victor 
 over himself, as that is the basest and most evil 
 condition when a man is defeated by himself."^ 
 We are still within the bounds of philosophy when 
 the object of this victory is made the Idea of the 
 Good, regarded as an entity outside of the soul, 
 which plays a dominant part in our moral life as 
 the final cause of our being. We pass to theolo- 
 
 906a gy when, as in the preamble to the Laws, the 
 
 1 This is the Hobbian state of nature in which all men are at 
 enmity with one another, carried down to the original "warfare 
 within the cave." With Plato, however, the remedy for this evil 
 is not a mechanical transference of rights by contract to a mon- 
 arch in whom the will of society is centred, but must come through 
 the victory of right over wrong, of the higher self over the lower, 
 beginning with the individual man and so extending to society. 
 
 198 
 
THE CREATION 199 
 
 gods are brought into the warfare as personifica- 
 tions, or manipulators it might better be said, of 
 the Good: "The heavens are filled with powers of 
 good, many in number, and with contrary powers, 
 more numerous still than the good; and now we 
 sa}^ that we are involved with these in a deathless 
 battle needing a marvellous guard, and that the 
 gods and daemons are our allies." The further 
 step to mythology is taken when the procedure 
 of the divine Providence is described in detail 
 as preparing for men a judgment seat and as 
 guiding men upwards, so far as they suffer them- 
 selves to be guided, bj^ the pathway of birth and 
 rebirth. In this last stage the essential truth of 
 philosophy as a concern of the individual soul, 
 is rendered vivid and convincing by clothing it 
 in the imaginative garb of fiction — fiction which 
 yet may be only a veil, more or less transparent, 
 through which we behold the actual events of the 
 spirit world; and this aid of the imagination is 
 needed just because the dualism of consciousness 
 cannot be grasped by the reason, demands indeed 
 a certain abatement of that rationalizing tendency 
 of the mind which, if left to itself, inevitably seeks 
 its satisfaction in one or the other form of mon- 
 
 ism.^ 
 
 But there is another, yet similar, use of the 
 
 2 For the all-important role of reason in conduct and the prac- 
 tical affairs of life see Platonism 114 et passim. 
 
200 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 imagination whereby the problem is considered 
 not so much from the side of the individual human 
 soul as from that of the gods who take part in the 
 eternal warfare of good and evil. How shall we 
 present to ourselves the cosmic dualism which 
 corresponds, we are bound to beheve, with the 
 dualism of our consciousness? Here again it is 
 of the very nature of the question that it cannot 
 be satisfactorily answered by reason, that reason, 
 if left to her own devices, will not be content 
 with arguing from, but will attempt to explain 
 away, the facts which give rise to the question. 
 The only practicable method of dealing with the 
 matter is by means of mythology; and in the 
 Timaeus Plato has appended what may be called 
 a cosmic story of creation to his theology, as a 
 complement to his psychic myth of metempsy- 
 chosis and judgment. 
 
 Now the very structure of the Timaeus is sig- 
 nificant. As is usual with him, Plato is careful 
 to mark here the divisions of his argument by 
 skillfully prepared transitions, and one can see 
 at a glance that the dialogue is divided into an in- 
 troduction, and then into two main sections ex- 
 tending respectively from 27d to 47e and from 
 47e to the end. The subject of both these main 
 sections is the creation and ordering of the visible 
 universe, but this work is regarded from two dif- 
 ferent angles. In the first section the point of 
 
THE CREATION 201 
 
 view is from above, so to speak; we are looking 
 upon creation as a divine effect and as fulfilling 
 a divine purpose, and it is noteworthy that both 
 matter and soul are considered here under the 
 laws and sj^mbols of number and time and mo- 
 tion, that is subjectively. In the second section 
 the point of view is inverted, and the work of 
 creation is seen from below, still as a divine pro- 
 duct, but as conditioned by the material out of 
 which it is framed and under the objective laws 
 and symbols of space and geometrical form. 
 Again, each of these two main sections is sub- 
 divided. The first subdivision of each section 
 (extending respectively from 27d to 42e and 
 from 47e to 69a) deals with the activity of God, 
 the Demiurge ("maker," "artificer," "creator"), 
 while the second subdivision of each section ( from 
 42e to 47e and from 69a to the end) tells what is 
 done by the lesser gods under the command of 
 the Demiurge. 
 
 The further articulation of the dialogue — or 
 narration it might be called more exactly, since 
 the account of creation is all in the mouth of one 
 speaker — by prologues, transitions and epilogues 
 is interesting as bearing on Plato's rhetorical art, 
 but need not detain us now. The point to observe 
 is that the clear dichotomy of form suggests im- 
 mediately a corresponding dichotomy of thought 
 underlying the whole argument. And this sur- 
 
202 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 mise is confirmed by the plain statement made 
 27d at the opening of the narration: "In the first 
 place, then, in my opinion, we must distinguish 
 these two things: What is that which always is 
 and has no becoming, and what is that which, 
 always becoming, never is? The one, being 
 always tlie same, we comprehend by thought with 
 reason ; the other, becoming and perishing, never 
 really being, we guess at by opinion with unrea- 
 soning perception." Thus, in a couple of sen- 
 tences, Plato lays down this summary of his philo- 
 sophical dualism as the foundation of his mytho- 
 logical superstructure; and he clinches its im- 
 portance by repeating the same statement early 
 siD in the second of the main sections. 
 
 In the first main section of the narrative we 
 have then, the dualism of knowledge and opinion 
 carried on into the objective realm of Ideas and 
 phenomena. JNIany times in the earlier dialogues 
 Plato had discussed the relation of these two or- 
 ders of existence, asking himself how in essence 
 they could remain absolutely distinguished yet 
 could be interactive, and he had found no solu- 
 tion of the problem: "participation," "imitation," 
 and the like were only names for an association 
 which it was necessary to assume but which eluded 
 all rational explanation. In the Parmenides he 
 ^ had ended by denying the right of metaphysics to 
 meddle with the matter at all. Now, in the 
 
THE CREATION 203 
 
 Timaeus, he will cut the Gordian knot with the 
 sword of mythology ; and by giving the name of 
 God to what may be regarded as the dynamic 
 element in Ideas, and thus separating God as 
 good from the Idea of goodness, will be able to 
 speak of phenomena as the handiwork of a crea- 
 tor who fashions this visible world after an Ideal 
 pattern. So the hint thrown out in the Sophist, 247e 
 that there is a certain faculty (or power, dy- 
 namis) in Ideas, by which they work down into 
 phenomena, is developed into a splendid allegory 
 of creation. 
 
 But creation could not be with a Greek philoso- 
 pher, as it was to be with the Christians, an evo- 
 cation of something out of nothing by a mere 
 word of fiat: "creation," indeed, in our sense, is 
 rather a misnomer for what is more properly an 
 act of fashioning or shaping. To Plato the 
 thought of a creator and a thing created implied 
 necessarily the presence of a substance out of 
 which tlie object is created. Hence the initial 
 dualism of Ideas and phenomena must be com- 
 pleted by the addition of a third order of exist- 
 ence, to which he gives a variety of names : space, 
 the receptacle, the recipient of impressions, the 
 nurse or mother, the invisible and shapeless kind, 
 necessity. And as being and becoming. Ideas 
 and phenomena, are the objective terms of 
 knowledge and opinion, so this third order cor- 
 
204. THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 responds to a faculty of the soul that is neither 
 knowledge nor opinion, but a sort of inf rarational 
 intuition : 
 
 "If what I say is correct, then we must admit 
 there is first the kind of being that exists immut- 
 ably, unbegotten and imperishable, neither re- 
 ceiving into itself anything else from without nor 
 itself passing into anything else, but invisible and 
 altogether imperceptible to the senses, that kind 
 of being which we contemplate with the reason. 
 And there is a second kind, of the same name as 
 the first and similar to it, perceptible, begotten, 
 forever in motion, becoming in a certain place 
 and again perishing thence, comprehensible by 
 opinion with the aid of perception. And there 
 is still a third kind, that of everlasting space, 
 which suffers no destruction but offers a place for 
 the genesis of all things, itself palpable to a cer- 
 tain sort of bastard reasoning without true per- 
 ception, a matter of belief and scarcely that." 
 
 But it is important to note that the real transi- 
 tion is not from a dyad to a triad, but from one 
 dyad to another, from the contrast, that is to say, 
 between being and becoming to the more radical 
 contrast between being and what, by virtue of 
 its native disorder and unrest and formlessness, 
 might be designated as a kind of not-being, or, in 
 the terminology of the Sophist, a kind of absolute 
 "otherwiseness." The fundamental conception of 
 Timaeus 46d thc dialoguc is still dualistic : there are two causes, 
 
THE CREATION 205 
 
 or substances, not three, and the visible world in 
 which our life passes is a commingling of these, 
 a realm of appearances hovering between the two 
 extremes of true and bastard reality. We shall 
 quite miss the purpose of Plato's mythological 
 scheme if we refuse to recognize the radical dual- 
 ism underlying the superficial dualism of being 
 and becoming, or are seduced by rationalism to 
 substitute any form of monism for it or to ex- 
 plain it away by any HegeHan juggling of terms. 
 The conception of the world as born from the 
 coming together of the two causes is in no sense 
 of the word a rationalizing reconciliation of con- 
 traries, but a mythological elaboration of the fact 
 of consciousness that in our one person two con- 
 trary and irreconcilable natures coexist.^ 
 
 The theme of the Timaeus, then, presented 
 schematically would appear thus : 
 
 The divine cause The necessary cause 
 
 God Necessity 
 
 The Gods Space 
 
 The Ideal Pattern The receptacle 
 
 The substance to be moulded 
 
 The world of forms and phenomena 
 A living creature with soul and body 
 
 3 In a later volume we shall see how this same truth of philoso- 
 phy forms the basis of the Chalcedonian Definition of the one 
 person and two natures of Christ. 
 
206 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 Now examining the higher, or divine, cause a 
 little more closely, we first observe that the word 
 God (tkeos), in accordance with the genius of 
 the Greek language, has a fluidity of meaning 
 which it is difficult for us, with our habit of 
 speech, to follow. Our "God," even more rigidly 
 than the Deus of Latin theology, is reserved for 
 the one supreme Being, and it would strike us as 
 sacrilegious to use it of any other being. But it 
 is not so in Greek. The word theos is applied 
 quite freely by the Hellenistic Fathers, after the 
 manner of the philosophers, to men, and, in gen- 
 eral, is equivalent loosely to the divine quality, 
 more specifically to the immortal, wherever it oc- 
 curs.^ Hence we shall not be surprised to find a 
 similar fluidity in Plato's terminology for the 
 higher cause. Generically, as distinguished from 
 the other extreme, this higher cause is the divine, 
 the godlike (to theion). But the divine as a 
 cause may be taken in two ways, as the active and 
 personal and as the passive and formal, as the 
 creator and as the Ideal pattern after which he 
 models the work of creation. 
 
 4 Dean Inge, in his Christian Mysticism (Appendix C), has 
 called attention to this extraordinary fluidity of the word. So, to 
 note one or two illustrations not given by him, Origen, In Joan., 
 Fragm. 2, says, 'Ekcivovs 6eov^ ii-rrev irpos ovs o Aoyos tov Otov 
 lyiv€TO (cf. John X, 35), and Gregory Nazienzen, Theol. Or. 4, says, 
 M.c$' rjv icrraraL (6 Xpicrros) ^eos ev fX€(rw Btoiv, rStv crw^o/Licvwv, 
 OLUKpLvoiv Kal SiacrreAAwj', tivos CKacrro? Ti/x^s Koi fxovrj^ a^ios. 
 
THE CREATION 207 
 
 Furthermore, conformably with the free man- 
 ner of Greek theology, the personal cause is re- 
 garded now as the one God, and now polythe- 
 istically as a company of lesser gods. For the 
 most part this distinction between God and the 
 lesser gods is carried out consistently in the 
 Timaeus. To the former is ascribed the initial 
 formative act of creation and the fabrication of 
 the world as a whole, as a mortal creature fash- 
 ioned of soul and body and embracing within it- 
 self all individual creatures ; whereas to the lesser 
 gods is left the task of completing the work by 
 the creation and government of these individual 
 creatures, including man. But the distinction is 
 occasionally forgotten, and particularly in the 
 second subdivision of the second main section the 
 terms God and gods are employed almost indis- 
 criminately where by strict propriety only gods 
 should be found. In fact, the distinction between 
 God and gods is rather artificial than essential 
 with Plato, and has no great significance. His 
 chief reason for making it at all would appear to 
 be that, by limiting the contact of God to the 
 universe regarded as a whole and subject to the 
 uniformity of law, he may separate the divine 
 goodness more reverently from the irregularities 
 which seem to belong rather to the individual 
 members of the system; God, he says, repeating J'"""^ ^^"^ 
 
 IT P rwii XI 7 7. • O Republic 617e 
 
 the dictum 01 1 he Kepubiic, is not responsible 
 
208 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 for the evils to be. Yet, after all, these lesser 
 artificers merely follow out the commands of their 
 Father, and their formal subordination to him is 
 not much more than a convenient fiction for the 
 fact that we cannot comprehend the relation be- 
 tween a perfect creator and an imperfect crea- 
 tion.^ 
 
 In regard to the other aspect of the divine 
 cause, viz. the Ideal pattern (parcideigma) to 
 which God looked while framing the phenomenal 
 world, opinions have differed: did it have a real 
 existence outside of the mind of the creator, or 
 was it merely the conception or plan within his 
 mind? To Philo, the Platonizing Jew, with his 
 thought of God as all in all, only the second of 
 these interpretations was possible. "So also," he 
 says, "we must think of God, that, having in mind 
 to create the great city of the universe, he first 
 conceived its outlines, from which he fashioned an 
 intelligible (Ideal) world, and then, with this as 
 his pattern, executed the sensible world. As 
 therefore the city as it is first outlined in the 
 architect occupies no place outside but is an im- 
 pression in the soul of the artist, in the same 
 manner the world composed of Ideas would have 
 no other place than the divine reason which or- 
 
 5 In Numenius and the later Pythagorizing philosophers gen- 
 erally Plato's loose attempt to exonerate his supreme deity be- 
 comes petrified into a rather mischievous metaphysical system. 
 
THE CREATION 209 
 
 dered these things; for of his powers (or facul- 
 ties, dynameis) what other place would there be, 
 capable of admitting and holding, I will not say 
 all these powers, but any one of them in its 
 purity?"*' 
 
 This conception of Philo's has at least the merit 
 of simplicity and clearness, and it was readily 
 assimilated by the Christian interpreters of Plato 
 who sought the beginning and source of all things 
 in God alone. In such a belief, so long as it re- 
 mains consistent with itself, justice and right- 
 eousness and beauty should be simply the will of 
 God; what he decrees arbitrarily, that is good, 
 and Goodness is only another name for God's 
 being. Evil by the same token has no meaning 
 except as disobedience to His will.^ But certainly 
 such a belief cannot be reconciled with the lan- 
 guage of Plato. I have already referred^ to the 
 passage of the Euthyphro in which he argues 
 that the moral Ideas are distinct from the will 
 of God, and in a manner superior to it. And so 
 in the Timaeus he is careful not to confuse God, 
 who as a personal creator is good and free from 
 QUYj, with the pattern of Goodness which guided 
 
 6 De Opificio Mundi §§4, 5. — According to Reitzenstein (Poi- 
 mandres 45 e< al.) this Philonic conception may be found in the 
 Hermetic literature of the age, and may have roots in Egyptian 
 mythology. 
 
 7 See chapter ii, note 4. 
 
 8 See ante, page 41. 
 
210 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 his hand in the work of creation. I do not say 
 that such a distinction is without difficulties; for 
 if God is good, there is goodness in his mind, 
 and it is at least puzzling to understand how 
 this subjective goodness is different from Good- 
 ness in itself. But this is an embarrassment that 
 haunts the whole doctrine of Ideas : it can be an- 
 swered only by showing how the contrary theory 
 {i.e. that Ideas do not exist separately) is beset 
 with more disastrous logical consequences. In 
 general the error of Philo may be described as an 
 undue subordination of Plato's philosophy to his 
 theology. Echoes of it may be heard among the 
 interpreters of today; but the more fashionable 
 mode among scholars educated in an idealism of 
 Teutonic stamp is rather to subordinate, or vir- 
 tually eliminate, Plato's theology, and to regard 
 the word God as merely a loose or popular ex- 
 pression for the Idea of the Good. Thus, to take 
 the latest, and not the least learned, of the com- 
 mentators. Prof. Wilamowitz-Moellendorff holds 
 that, despite Plato's senile concession to the popu- 
 lar religion, "his God remained to the end the 
 Good, True, Beautiful, which penetrates, moves, 
 and vitalizes all, a Godhood which we love, yet 
 with no desire that it should love us in return, 
 like the Godhood of Spinoza." And elsewhere, 
 in language approaching the dithyrambic, he 
 lauds the conclusion of the sixth book of The Re- 
 
THE CREATION 211 
 
 public as "the moment in which Plato conceived 
 the Idea of the Good as his God." This was "Pla- 
 to's way of bestowing upon mankind a new re- 
 ligion through science.'"" Now I am ready to 
 admit that the language of this one passage of 
 The Republic, taken alone, lends support to such 
 a theory; but even here the Good is set forth 
 rather as the teleological than the efficient cause : 
 that is to say, it is the purpose of creation, the 
 goal towards which all our being and all the 
 world's being should be directed, and hence in a 
 way above being, exactly as in the Timaeus the 
 Ideal world is the pattern towards which the 
 phenomenal world, so far as this is possible, shall 
 be shaped and guided. Elsewhere in The Re- 
 public the language used of God and the gods is 
 of such a character as to make their identification 
 
 Platon I, 583, 419, 408. — For a full presentation of the view 
 held by Wilamowitz-Moellendorff and most of the other modern 
 commentators see Wilhelm Biehl's Idee des Guten bet Platon. An 
 excellent brief statement of it will be found in Baron von Hiigel's 
 Mystical Element of Religion II, 311. Both Wilamowitz-Moellen- 
 dorff and Baron von Hiigel appeal to Philebus 22c as the strongest 
 support of their contention. Plato is there arguing the question 
 whether pleasure or intellect is the chief cause of that happy 
 life which is our summum bonum. Pleasure, which Philebus wor- 
 ships as a god, cannot, he says, be such a cause; nor can the 
 imperfect human reason be such a cause, though the true and 
 divine reason may be. I cannot see that the passage means 
 more than this. I may admit, however, while on this subject, that 
 my own language in Platonism 201 needs correction, or at least 
 modification. 
 
212 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 with impersonal Ideas almost a wilful perversion 
 of Plato's plain meaning. Rightly understood, 
 there is not a word in this dialogue that indicates 
 any discrepancy here between his philosophy and 
 the mythology of the Phaedrus, the Symposiurrij 
 the Politicus, and the Timaeus.^^ 
 
 These two modes of interpretation, one ab- 
 sorbing Plato's philosophy in his theology, the 
 other absorbing his theology in his philosophy, 
 though seemingly contrary, really come together 
 in the end." As they prevail today, they both 
 descend by circuitous ways from the Plotinian 
 metaphysic of a supreme Unity out of which pro- 
 ceeds the Ideal realm of intelligence (nous) and 
 
 10 In the discussion of art in the tenth book of The Republic 
 God is said to be the maker of the table itself as it is in nature 
 (i.e. the Idea of the table), whereas the table made by the car- 
 penter is an imitation of this, while the work of the painter is 
 only an imitation of an imitation. Now, in the first place, what- 
 ever is meant by this passage, it lends no support to the identi- 
 fication of God with Ideas or with any Idea. Nor do I believe 
 that Plato really meant to contradict his constant view of ethical 
 Ideas as in a way prior logically to God, as for instance in the 
 allegory of the Phaedrus (249c: tt/jos olairtp deos wv ^cios ecrriv). 
 Plato is leading up to the distinction between the man who actually 
 practices virtue and the man who, as play-actor or otherwise, 
 merely simulates the practice of virtue. Hence the three spheres 
 (Republic 597b) : the Ideas themselves of which God is lord or 
 overseer, the conduct of human life as modeled upon Ideas, and 
 the pretence of such conduct. 
 
 11 They do virtually coalesce in Archer-Hind's introduction to 
 the Timaeus. 
 
THE CREATION 213 
 
 the intelligible {to nocton) . It makes no great 
 difference whether the terminology adapted to 
 such an abstract Unity assumes a theological or a 
 philosophical cast; in either case the practical 
 discriminations of philosophy and theology and 
 mythology are engulfed in the abyss of the abso- 
 lute. I cannot see how the clear distinction be- 
 tween the Demiurge and the Ideal pattern in the 
 Timaeus can be lost or glossed over without emas- 
 culating the religion of Plato. Nor is it any 
 withdrawal from this position to admit that a 
 certain penumbra of obscurity is left, intention- 
 ally perhaps, about both these conceptions. As 
 in the preamble to the Laws Plato's language 
 wavered between a philosophical monotheism and 
 a recognition of isolated manifestations of the 
 divine vaguely grasped by the popular imagina- 
 tion, so his terminology varies, with only a little 
 less indecision, in the Timaeus. But of the being 
 of God or gods, rather of God and gods, per- 
 sonal and very real, now withdrawn from mortal 
 ken and now haunting some scene of this earth, 
 even appearing manifestly as strange visitors 
 among men, governing the great world and al- 
 ways attentive to human needs, — of this truth 
 he exhibits no doubt at all. In the same way 
 the nature of the Ideal world cannot be defined; 
 but it is there, open to the eyes of the gods, and to 
 the eyes of men if they will see. All things are 
 
214 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 there, not imperfect as they are here, but as they 
 would be if freed from the distorting thrust and 
 pull of the nether world. 
 
 It might seem that for the moment Plato had 
 
 39e forgotten his own distinction when he speaks of 
 the gods themselves, as having an existence in the 
 Ideal world. That is possibly only another way 
 of expressing what the divine power would be 
 where no limitations were imposed upon its min- 
 istry. Rather, I think, it signifies that gods and 
 Ideas both belong to that general conception of 
 the divine, not as something above both and an- 
 nulling their difference, but as a name embracing 
 both and answering to the dimness of our under- 
 standing. In hke manner this world is said more 
 
 37^, precisely to be fashioned after the Ideal pattern; 
 yet in looser language Plato may speak of it as an 
 
 29E image of the eternal gods, or as made to resem- 
 
 34a ble the good God, or even as itself the god to be 
 and a blessed god. Is this laxity of thought? 
 Possibly ; but still more I take it to be a reflection 
 of the strange paradox that in one sense the only 
 knowledge we possess is of the divine, yet of this 
 knowledge our reason can give but a faltering 
 account. Our highest assurance is conditioned 
 Laws 71SK on humihty. "God, as the ancient saying is, hold- 
 ing the beginning and the end and the middle 
 of all things that are, moves straight on to his 
 goal by the seemingly devious ways of nature; 
 
THE CREATION 215 
 
 and with him follows always Justice, the avenger 
 of those that depart from the divine law. To 
 this Justice he that will be happy clings, and fol- 
 lows with her, humble and chastened." Such is 
 the preface to Plato's theology, and his myth of 
 creation calls for a deeper humility and a more 
 chastened spirit. 
 
 At the other extreme from the divine cause 
 stands the necessary cause, which, again, like the 
 divine, is regarded now as passive and now as 
 active. In its passive aspect it receives many 
 names, all mere approximations for the dark 
 reality. It is called space; but it is not absolute 
 emptiness of being which the word signifies when 
 taken literally, for it is also likened to the mass 
 or substance which is recipient of impressions. It 
 is not matter, in so far as by matter we mean a 
 body perceptible to our senses and classifiable 
 by reason; rather it is the potentiality of matter 
 before the elements have come into being. Yet 
 again it is not motion, or the principle of mo- 
 tion, regarded as a calculable, continuous opera- 
 tion, for such motion is the property of soul. 
 Itself it is invisible and formless, the receptacle 
 and mother of all visible forms, and that out of 
 which such forms proceed, the disorder under- 
 lying all order. One might think of it as the in- 
 verted Idea, known to us by a kind of reluctant 
 necessity of reason or bastard intuition. 
 
216 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 In its active capacity, considered not merely 
 as a blank recipient of the forms of matter but as 
 an ever-restless power imposing certain inevitable 
 conditions upon creation, this dark substratum of 
 existence, set over against and in a manner op- 
 posed to the active element of the divine, is called 
 more specifically Necessity (ananke) , a necessity 
 which, having in itself no purpose or design, be- 
 ing in fact the last irreducible resistance to de- 
 sign, is virtually synonymous with Chance. 
 
 So we have God and the Ideal pattern at one 
 extreme of being, and at the other extreme Ne- 
 cessity and the flux of chaos. Between them 
 the process of creation would be something like 
 
 53b this. Wlien the creator took upon himself the 
 task of framing a cosmos, he found as it were 
 traces and hints of the elements in the abyss of 
 chaos, lying in such haphazard state as would be 
 
 69b expected of things without god. They were not 
 yet properly the elements with settled laws and 
 relations one to the other, nor could they rightly 
 be called by specific names, save as for a moment, 
 by some accident of mutation, they seemed to rest 
 in this or that form. Here, in this potentiality 
 of chance, so to speak, was the open door for the 
 
 48A entrance of design. "For the genesis of this cos- 
 mos is a mingled birth, a concurrence of necessity 
 and reason; and the beginning was thus: reason 
 got control of necessity by persuading it to bring 
 
THE CREATION 217 
 
 on most things to their best end as they came into 
 existence ; and so and in such manner, by the act 
 of necessity submitting to reasonable persuasion, 
 the universe was composed." In more modem 
 terms creation would be described as a process 
 of evolution by the interaction of chance and de- 
 sign. In the infinite combinations of brute na- 
 ture certain forms or approximations to form are 
 thrown out, but with no power of persistence or 
 cohesion. On these the creator, or the hidden sec 
 Purpose, lays hold, and, so far as the yielding 
 nature of necessity permits (that is, in so far as 
 chance may be governed), combines them gradu- 
 ally into a world of ordered relations. In such 
 manner, as the disorder of chance yields to de- 
 sign, necessity is transformed into physical law 
 as this is known to science and is formulated in 
 mathematics ;^^ but it is still a necessity rooted in 
 chance, and to Plato at least science is never more 
 than an approximation to knowledge, dealing 59c 
 with approximate laws, a venture into the de- 
 lightful realm of probabilities. Plato's theory of 
 creation thus harmonized the two views which, 
 separated, were to form the basis respectively of 
 Epicurean and Stoics physics, the one attempt- 
 ing to account for the nature of things by pure 
 chance and the mechanical law (whence derived?) 
 
 12 See the hint thrown out Republic 458d, with James Adam's 
 note, and compare Timaeus 69a. 
 
218 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 of probability, the other seeing everywhere only 
 design and no chance at all in the universe. 
 
 So interpreted, Plato is an optimist of a sort, 
 but certainly not an optimist as the word is 
 ascribed to the philosophy of Leibnitz. The 
 point is of some importance in its ethical bear- 
 ing. In the Continuation of the Dialogue of 
 Laurentius Valla and in the Controversy with 
 Bayle, which form sections of the Theodicy, 
 Leibnitz tells in an allegory how a certain Theo- 
 dore is carried by the goddess of wisdom to the 
 Palace of Destinies, where he beholds as it were 
 piled up in a pyramid samples of all conceivable 
 worlds, at the apex the best possible world and 
 from this extending downwards in infinite series 
 ever less perfect worlds. These are the Ideas on 
 which the creator looked, and from which in his 
 infinite goodness and power he selected the point 
 of the pyramid as the model of the phenomenal 
 world to be created. To those, then, who ask 
 why there is evil in a universe so created by an 
 omnipotent God in the hkeness of a perfect pat- 
 tern, the reply is that the best choice is not always 
 that which avoids evil, since it may be that the 
 evil brings with it a greater good. We know 
 from mathematics and otherwise that an imper- 
 fection in the part may be required for a greater 
 perfection in the whole. St. Augustine has said 
 a hundred times that God permitted evil in order 
 
THE CREATION 219 
 
 to draw from it a greater good; and Thomas 
 Aquinas also declares that the permission of evil 
 tends to the good of the universe. So the fall of 
 Adam was a felix culpa, a happy and fortunate 
 sin, since thereby the Incarnation has brought 
 to mankind a higher blessing than otherwise they 
 could have enjoyed. 
 
 That is optimism properly so called; it is the 
 contrary of everything that Plato meant to con- 
 vey in the myth of the Timaeus. By his "neces- 
 sary cause" Plato did not mean that evil was the 
 necessary condition or cause of good, but that it 
 was simply evil, actual and inexplicable, and so, 
 as one might say, necessary. In the Ideal world 
 there is no imperfection, no "best possible," but 
 absolute good; and if evil and imperfection are 
 discovered in the copy, as indeed they are not 
 discovered but thrust upon our gaze, that is be- 
 cause there is a something intrinsically evil, a 
 dark and undiscoverable power, which breaks the 
 perfect execution of the design. Plato was not 
 trying to justify God by minimizing, or virtually 
 denying, evil in the world, but was dressing a 
 fact in the symbols of the imagination. Our 
 world is not simply the best possible, but the best 
 possible under the given conditions. 
 
 The physical details of this phenomenal world, 
 so composed, belong rather to science than to re- 
 ligion, and I have omitted most of them in my 
 
69c 
 
 220 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 translation of the Timaeus. But what of soul, 
 and what is its place in the scheme? This is a 
 question vital to Plato's religion, but avowedly 
 difficult to answer. 
 
 In the first place we observe a distinction be- 
 etai. tween the immortal soul and the mortal, or be- 
 tween the immortal and the mortal parts of the 
 soul, which points at once to a psychic dualism 
 corresponding to the cosmic dualism of the myth. 
 As it is said in the little sermon on the soul in 
 726 the preamble to the Laws: "To every man his all 
 is dual." But this simple dichotomy is compli- 
 cated by another division of the soul, following 
 the psychology of The Republic, into three f acul- 
 ^^^^- ties, or modes of activity, viz. reason (nous), the 
 emotions (to thymoeides) , and the concupiscence 
 (to e pithy metikon) ; and it is not clear at a glance 
 how these two divisions, the dual and the tripar- 
 tite, are to be reconciled. The first adjustment 
 would be to reckon the two lower faculties to- 
 gether as the mortal part, and to separate reason 
 from them as the immortal ; and this arrangement 
 is correct in so far as the emotional and concu- 
 piscent faculties certainly belong to what is mor- 
 tal in the soul. But with reason the problem is 
 not so simple. To begin with, reason has a double 
 3^^ function, as it is concerned with both the Same 
 36c and the Other, that is to say with what is per- 
 ^^"^ manent and invariable, and with what is always 
 
THE CREATION 221 
 
 changing and never abiding. In other words 
 there is a division within reason corresponding to 
 the distinction between the knowledge of things 
 that are (Ideas) and the opinion of things that 
 seem (phenomena) which made the starting point 27d 
 of the whole argument of the dialogue, and which 
 indeed runs hke a guiding thread through all of 
 Plato's philosophy. Now as possessing know- 
 ledge and being akin to the immutable objects of 
 eternity reason is manifestly eternal; and in this 
 belief we are confirmed by the statement that then 
 only shall the immortal part of a man be freed 
 from the hazards of an ever-changing and per- 
 turbed existence and be restored to its celestial 
 home, when it has been schooled by philosophy to 
 move in harmony with the unvarying revolutions 
 of the Same as these are seen in the heavens and 
 as they may be found by searching in the soul 
 itself. As the organ of opinion, on the other 
 hand, reason has a share in physical life and is, 
 like the things with which it deals, mortal. The 
 problem of the reason thus falls back at last on the 
 obscure paradox of the one and the many as seen 
 in the "philosophy of the soul." 
 
 Two observations may be added to avoid mis- 
 understanding. First, when such words as di- 
 vision and dichotomy are used it does not mean 
 that one part of the soul can be cut from the 
 other as we can sever the hmbs of the body. Sec- 
 
30b 
 
 34c 
 
 222 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 ondly, because opinion is concerned with what is 
 only ephemerally stable (if the oxymoron may 
 be allowed), it does not follow that such use of 
 the reason is necessarily erroneous or negligible. 
 On the contrary Plato distinguishes carefully be- 
 tween true opinion which corresponds with facts 
 and false opinion which misjudges facts; and he 
 makes it clear that our conduct in detail, under 
 any given set of circumstances, must be guided by 
 the formation of true opinion and by the right 
 use of the practical reason. 
 
 Such is the nature of soul. As for its origin, 
 we are told that, as all things reasonable are 
 fairer than things without reason and as reason 
 cannot be present without soul, therefore God 
 set reason in soul, and soul in body, and so by his 
 providence fashioned the world as best it might 
 be. Now by the statement that reason cannot 
 exist without soul Plato would seem to mean 
 that reason is a part of soul, or, rather, that reason 
 is a name for soul in its purity. He does not 
 say, be it noted, that soul cannot exist without 
 body, and he does say that soul is in reality prior 
 (in dignity rather than in time) to body. Thus 
 the world is made a living creature, with soul and 
 reason, with a rational soul that is, which pos- 
 sesses consciousness and is sufficient to itself in 
 its own love and knowledge. 
 
 To the question whether God himself is a soul 
 
THE CREATION 223 
 
 Plato in the Timaeus gives no direct answer, but 
 there can be no doubt as to his intention. In the 
 first place, emphatically, God is not identical with 
 the world-soul; there is no trace anywhere in 
 Plato's works of pantheism or a pantheistic im- 
 manence, nor any place for them in his philoso- 
 phy. And further, God has no body; he is not 
 a composite (synamphoteron) , a living creature 
 such as the world is and as man is to be. But if 
 the Timaeus thus separates God from the world 
 and leaves him without a body, it does not de- 
 prive him of the attributes of soul; to have done 
 so would have been to run counter to the main 
 argument for the existence of God as we have 
 read it in the Laws, not to mention other passages 
 to the same import. The Timaeus does in fact 
 represent him as morally affected (as good, with- 
 out envy, etc.), as abiding in his o^vn charac- 
 ter, as going about his work with intelligence, 
 and making calculations, as possessing reason — 
 rather, as a soul in the form of pure reason, creat- 
 ing, governing, guiding. All these of course are 
 mythological expressions, accommodations to our 
 groping approach to a Being beyond our com- 
 prehension — "the maker and father is hard to find 28c 
 out and cannot be told to all men" — but I think 
 that on the whole Plato took them rather simply, 
 and in his language generally there is a notable 
 absence of such vague transcendentalism as, when 
 
2M THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 examined, reduces God to an empty word. His 
 dualism saved him from the metaphysical agony 
 that sometimes troubles a monistic theology.^^ 
 
 27a The lesser gods and the world-soul are the cre- 
 
 ation, or, in accordance with a distinction read 
 by later theologians into the phrase "maker and 
 father," the offspring of the Demiurge. In the 
 fashioning of the souls of men there is a double 
 
 4iD process. First, it is said, the Demiurge, taking 
 what remained of the soul-stuff, no longer pure 
 but mixed with runnings of the second and third 
 order, flawed, that is, as the words seem to imply, 
 by the potentiality of faculties of a lower nature, 
 — taking and mingling this, the Demiurge now 
 creates individual souls equal in number to the 
 stars, wherein, riding for a season as in celestial 
 chariots, they discern the laws of being and of 
 destiny. With these first principles, or intuitions, 
 planted in them, the souls are turned over to the 
 lesser gods for further fashioning and guidance. 
 From their hands is derived the mortal element 
 
 69c of the soul, "having in itself dreadful and com- 
 pelling passions — pleasure first, the greatest in- 
 citement to evil, then pains that frighten away 
 
 13 Plutarch, De Defectu Orac. 10: Ot /xcv ovSevo? aTrXcos rbv 
 debv oi 8* o/Aoi) rt irdvTwv atrtov ttoioCvtcs d(rTO)(ov(TL tov fxirpiov 
 Kal TrpcTTOVTOs. «v fiiv ovv Acyovo't koL ol AeyovT£s, on IIAaTwv to 
 Tats yevvw/Acvats TTOiorr^o-tv VTTOKtCfi.(.vov o-Toi;(etov e^fvpwv, o vvv 
 v\r)v Kal <^v(riv KaXovaiv, ttoWwv dTrrjkXa$€ kol /xeydXwv diropiwv 
 Tovs <f>i\o<r6(f>ovx. 
 
THE CREATION 225 
 
 good, and besides these confidence and fear, wit- 
 less counsellors both, and wrath hard to appease, 
 and alluring hope. Having mingled these with 
 irrational sensation and with love that stops at 
 nothing, they composed as they could the mortal 
 soul of man." 
 
 For a temporal habitation and vehicle of this 
 composite soul the body is framed, and by a 
 quaint contrivance, taken by Plato apparently 
 with somewhat naive simplicity, the faculties 
 are kept separate by lodging reason in the head, 
 the emotions in the thorax, and concupiscence in 
 the abdomen. So men start on their mortal 
 career and play their diverse parts, passing from 
 birth to birth, and to higher and lower forms of 
 existence according as they obey the laws im- 
 planted in them by the Demiurge or give way to 
 the baser instincts of their nature. It is not that 
 pleasure and pain, or the desires and emotions 
 connected vdth them, are totally depraved in 
 themselves — such an assumption would make 
 nonsense of all the introductory books of the 
 Laws — but they contain the principle of evil in 
 so far as they are radically unlimited, belonging 
 by nature to what in itself is without measure 
 and tends by inertia to endless expansion. 
 Hence, left to themselves, they run to evil, where- 
 as under control they may become good, and the 
 art of life lies in the governing of pleasure and 
 
 69Dff 
 
226 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 pain by a law exterior to them, in a man's becom- 
 ing master of himself, or better than himself 
 (kreitton heautou). 
 
 What in this Platonic myth, one asks, is the 
 precise relation of soul to body, especially as re- 
 gards the origin of evil — a question of large prac- 
 tical consequences, to which unfortunately no un- 
 equivocal answer can be given. That in some 
 way there is a kinship between the principle of 
 evil in the soul and that principle of disorder in 
 the primordial substance which is never entirely 
 eliminated from the material world, so much is 
 clear. Both belong to what is intrinsically limit- 
 less, to the flux, to the infinite as the Greeks un- 
 derstood that word: both are a part of the dark 
 necessit}^ of existence which cannot be argued 
 away. By reason of this kinship, or similarity, 
 it is easy to transfer the terms of one to the other ; 
 and from this transference it is but a step to a 
 form of dualism which congregates all evil upon 
 the body and regards psychic evil as a conse- 
 quence merely of the soul's association with the 
 flesh. Hence the crude pessimism and asceticism 
 which arose at an early date in Hellenistic phi- 
 losophy and were not always rigidly excluded 
 from Christianity. Now undoubtedly in the 
 Timaeus Plato does occasionally speak as if the 
 body, with its inherent residue of rebellious dis- 
 order, were something more than kin to psychical 
 
THE CREATION 227 
 
 43c 
 44a 
 
 disorder, as, for example, in the passage where 
 he says that the motions of the elements, falling 
 upon the body hke tempestuous winds, set up a 
 disturbance which reaches to the soul and breaks 
 the harmony of its pristine revolutions. And im- 
 doubtedly such a view of the relation of body and 
 soul finds apparent support in certain of the ear- 
 lier dialogues. But on the other hand there is 
 the categorical statement of The Re public , never 609b 
 to be forgotten, that a man's soul contains within 
 itself its own principles of good and evil, distinct 
 from the good and evil of the body. And so, in 
 the Timaeiis, the individual soul as it comes from 
 the hand of the Demiurge, and before any contact 
 with the phenomenal world of time, bears the po- 
 tential germ of evil, which becomes actual and 
 active in those emotions and desires which are 
 the soul's mortal part, and for which the body is 
 fashioned. JNIaximus of Tyre would seem to be 
 right in finding in Platonism two sources of evil, 
 similar and confluent, but not identical, one in 
 the soul itself, the other in the primordial activity 
 of the substance out of which matter is evolved.^* 
 It is tempting to carry this analogy a step fur- 
 ther, and to attribute to the necessary cause a soul 
 
 ^* Philosophoumena xli, 4b: Tts ovv 17 t^s aTaa-da\ir]<; alruL ; 
 ovpavov Kttt yrji Svolv ccrTtaiv Tr]v /x€v afx-oipov rjyr^riov KaK<Ji)v, ttjv 
 8e f^ aya^oXv iTrLfxe/xLyfiivrjv y to. fxkv ayaBo. iwippvTa ex t^s €T€- 
 pas, TO. 8( KaKot i$ auTO<^uovs p.0)^9rjpta^ dvtoraTat. Sitt^ 8c 
 avTr;, 17 fxiv vXrj^ Traces, 17 Se i/'v;)(^s iiovaCa. 
 
THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 of evil balancing the soul of good in the divine 
 cause. Such in fact was the theory of Plutarch/^ 
 who saw in the lifeless, inert "recipient" the 
 primordial substance of matter, and to the active 
 aspect of the cause (the disorderly moving Ne- 
 cessity, ataktos ananke) gave the properties of 
 soul. And for this interpretation of the cosmic 
 myth he found support in Plato's passing refer- 
 896D ence in the Laws to the evil-doing soul of the 
 heavens and in the clear statement that all mo- 
 tion goes back to soul as the self-moved mover. 
 The cosmic causes and their product would thus 
 fall into a complete parallelism of soul and sub- 
 stance, which can be neatly schematized: 
 
 The divine cause 
 
 ( God, the soul of 
 I good 
 
 y The Ideal 
 
 Creation 
 
 The soul of the world 
 and its creatures 
 
 The necessary cause 
 
 Necessity, the soul 
 of evil 
 
 The primordial 
 
 Material phenomena 
 '\ pattern substance 
 
 The analogy is certainly seductive, and the 
 authority of Plutarch, one of the greatest if not 
 quite the greatest of all Platonists, ancient or 
 modern, should not lightly be set aside ; yet I am 
 inclined to think that we are bound to waive both 
 the analogy and the authority and to limit the ex- 
 tension of soul to God and the animate world. 
 The isolated hint of the Laws, however it be in- 
 terpreted, need not be carried into the mythology 
 
 15 De Animae Procreatione §§6, 7. 
 
THE CREATION 229 
 
 of the Timaeus; and the ascription of self-motion 
 to soul alone can be explained as meaning con- 
 scious and consecutive motion, or motion with a 
 purpose (telos). On the other hand the account 
 of the soul's creation can scarcely be forced into 
 the Plutarchian scheme ; and there is, I believe, not 
 a M^ord in the Timaeus which justifies a separa- 
 tion of the active and passive aspects of the neces- 
 sary cause (this distinction of active and passive 
 itself being in fact merely inferential) in a man- 
 ner corresponding to the separation of God and 
 Ideas in the divine cause. Though in its outer 
 aspect the evil underlying the natural world is 
 analogous to sin in the soul, each being a principle 
 of disorder and inert expansiveness, yet in an- 
 other sense the two are diverse, even contrary, in 
 their working. The effect of natural evil is to 
 break down the organized world into a kind of 
 chaotic sea of indifference ; it is the enemy of dis- 
 tinction and segregation. Psychical evil on the 
 other hand has just the opposite tendency. As 
 Plato shows in the argument for immortality in 
 the tenth book of TJie Republic, its source is not 
 general but particular, and its effect is rather to 
 sharpen the personal isolation of the soul and to 
 intensify the principle of individualization. 
 
 The attempt to force the myth of the Timaeus 
 into the Procrustean bed of logic has thus given 
 rise to two incompatible theories: one which 
 
230 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 would find a complete parallelism of soul and 
 body, each with its own principle of good and 
 evil; another which would result in a sharp hos- 
 tility of soul and body, by making soul the source 
 of good and body the source of evil. The former 
 theory was adopted by Plutarch, the latter went 
 over into various schools of pessimism and as- 
 ceticism. Of the two the parallelism of Plutarch 
 is certainly closer to the general trend of Plato's 
 thought than the other. It harmonizes more 
 readily with the thoroughly Grecian element in 
 Plato's views of education, and more particularly 
 
 87d with such passages of the Timaeus itself as that 
 which sets the law of healthy living in a due bal- 
 ance and adjustment of the activities of body and 
 soul ; Plato never learnt asceticism from his mas- 
 ter Socrates, nor did he ever develop it for him- 
 self. Yet, if nearer to the truth, the Plutarchian 
 theory is not quite the truth. It does not suf- 
 
 *^° ficiently recognize the soul as paidagogos, or dis- 
 ciplinarian leader in the partnership (though in 
 his practical ethics Plutarch was clear enough on 
 this point ) ; nor does it quite adequately keep hold 
 of the fact that the body, with its roots in the 
 dark chaos of necessity, is the instrument, if not 
 ultimately the cause, of psychical evil, and that 
 the way of salvation is strangely connected with 
 a release from the body's imperative needs and 
 impulses. 
 
THE CREATION 231 
 
 So the matter stands. I fear we must simply 
 admit that no perfectly consistent theory of body 
 and soul in their relation to evil can be drawn 
 from Plato's works. It is fair and safe to add 
 that no other teacher of philosophy or religion 
 has ever succeeded in solving this importunate 
 problem without doing violence in one direction 
 or another to the apparent facts of our moral ex- 
 perience. For a right understanding of the 
 Timaeus the essential point after all is this, that 
 Plato's myth is true to the dualism of his phi- 
 losophy, and, starting with evil as a given neces- 
 sity, virtually admits the incomprehensibility of 
 its origin. 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 MYTHOLOGY : THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 
 
 The Timaeus may be regarded as an elaborate 
 myth in which the imagination is allowed to deal 
 in its own way with certain obscure facts of 
 human experience. It displays the role of evil 
 in this world of ours, starting with the passions 
 of the soul, in themselves unregulated and end- 
 lessly expansive, and with a similar power of un- 
 rest in the background of nature. How, one 
 asks, does this mythical drama agree with Plato's 
 constant ethical doctrine that evil is somehow 
 identical with ignorance and that no man sins, or 
 errs, willingly? 
 
 Before attempting a solution of this problem it 
 may be well to note the position of the various 
 schools that attacked the question of evil in Hel- 
 lenistic times, and that are to be treated more 
 fully in later volumes of this series. For in truth 
 we come here to a matter which is at once the 
 source and consternation of most human thinking. 
 "The real riddle of existence," as Mansel says, 
 "the problem which confounds all philosophy, — 
 aye, and all religion, too, so far as religion is a 
 thing of man's reason, — is the fact that evil exists 
 
 232 
 
THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 233 
 
 at all"^ Mansel is right, I think, in attributing 
 the rout of philosophy — though I should have 
 preferred to say metaphysics, drawing here the 
 line between the legitimate and the illegitimate 
 use of the reason — and of rationalizing theology 
 to the endeavour to explain rationally what can- 
 not be so explained ; but I am right also, I trust, 
 in holding that the virtue of Platonism, when it 
 is true to itself, is in its rejection of metaphysics 
 at just this point. This difference of method be- 
 tween Platonism and the various Hellenistic 
 schools can be seen by a glance at the following 
 diagram, with the notes appended. The problem 
 of evil has two aspects, as it is related to the cos- 
 mos and to the individual. Under each of these 
 relations the various schools of thought would 
 naturally fall into two groups : those which cate- 
 gorically deny the existence of evil, and those 
 which, theoretically at least, admit its reality. 
 Among those which admit the reality of evil two 
 questions would then arise : the question of origin, 
 or how evil comes to be, and the question of re- 
 sponsibility. 
 
 ^ Bampton Lectures 145. 
 
234 
 
 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 rQ _0 
 
 ^;^ 
 
 bfl 
 
 fl 
 
 S 
 
 o 
 
 
 
 S 
 
 a5 
 
 S>D 
 
 9J 
 
 ^ 
 
 cr 
 
 3 
 
 
 A 
 
 rt N 
 
 
 
 OJ fl 
 
 H O O 
 
 s 
 *« "So 
 
 3 
 
 g^ 
 
 j:3 «+-! ^^ w 
 
 c 
 
 CIS 
 
 o .2 
 
 W O U 
 
 t^ 
 
 
 a 
 
 O 
 
 Evil 
 ad- ■ 
 mitted 
 
 
 -V 
 
 ^ 5 
 
 fl o 
 
 
 
THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 235 
 
 NOTES ON DIAGRAM 
 
 (a^) By the Stoic paradox is meant the theory 
 which regards the imperfections of the parts of a sys- 
 tem as necessary for the perfection of the whole as a 
 closed and unitary system. Such a use of the word 
 "necessary" is the very opposite of Plato's, implying 
 as it does not that evil is necessarily, i.e. inexplicably, 
 in the world, but that as a necessary factor of good it 
 is essentially not evil. Chrysippus summarizes the 
 Stoic theory in a few sentences quoted by Aulus Gellius : 
 "Nothing is more utterly blind and stupid than those 
 who think that goods could exist if there were not also 
 evils in the world. For as goods are the contrary of 
 evils, it is necessary that both should exist together, 
 each supporting the other by a kind of mutual resis- 
 tance."^ To which may be added Plutarch's comment 
 on a still bolder statement of the same paradox: "'It 
 is neither possible,' says Chrysippus, 'nor expedient 
 altogether to remove evil.' This is not the place to con- 
 sider whether it is inexpedient to remove lawlessness 
 and injustice and folly; but you yourself, Chrysippus, 
 are at strife with reason and God, in so far as by your 
 philosophizing you are doing what you can to annihilate 
 evil which it is inexpedient to annihilate."^ 
 
 2 Nodes Ambros. VI, i. An illegitimate expansion of Theaetetus 
 176a, Plato says, virevavTiov yap ti t<5 &ya$<^ del tlvai &vdyKr], 
 but he would have recoiled from the deduction, mutuo adverso 
 qiiaeque fulta nisu, 
 
 ^De Stoicorum Repugn. §36. — Professor Santayana, in his 
 Character and Opinion in the United States pp. 105 ff, has a 
 masterly analysis and refutation of Royce's attempt to revive the 
 old Stoic paradox. 
 
THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 (a^) Neoplatonism undertakes to account for evil 
 negatively by means of successive emanations, or expan- 
 sions, from a metaphysical Unity of an extreme type. 
 Theoretically, evil, as mere distance from, or diminution 
 of, Being, per se does not exist, is not-being. But with 
 this abstract theory is jumbled, rather clumsily, the 
 Stoic paradox. 
 
 (b^/?^) Epicureanism admits the existence of physical 
 evil, but by carrying everything back to blind chance as 
 the one ultimate cause really eliminates the moral dis- 
 tinction between evil and good. There can be no ques- 
 tion of responsibility in such a doctrine. 
 
 (b"/3^) Gnostics and Manicheans in general account 
 for evil by separating the Demiurge, or Creator, him- 
 self more or less evil, from the supreme God of good- 
 ness. Their theories are involved in a grotesque mythol- 
 ogy which sounds often like a travesty of Platonism. 
 The Demiurge is responsible, God is not. 
 
 (b^yS^) Christians start with the monistic assump- 
 tion of an absolute, omnipotent Deity who creates the 
 world by jiat out of nothing. The obvious dilemma 
 which confronts such a theory is thus put by Lactan- 
 tius into the mouth of an Epicurean atheist : "God, he 
 says, either wills to abolish evils and is not able, or is 
 able and does not will ; or He neither wills nor is able ; or 
 He both wills and is able. If He wills and is not able. 
 He is feeble; which cannot be said of God. If He is 
 able and does not will, He is malicious ; which also is 
 foreign to God. If He neither wills nor is able. He 
 is both malicious and feeble ; and so is not God. If He 
 wills and is able, whence then are evils, or why does He 
 
THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 237 
 
 not abolish them?" To escape this dilemma and to 
 relieve God of responsibility, evil is held to be a self- 
 origining intrusion into what was created good. On 
 this ground two main lines of apology are followed. 
 One is akin to the Stoic paradox, as stated thus by 
 Lactantius : "And for this reason He does not abolish 
 evils because, as I have explained. He has bestowed wis- 
 dom also at the same time, and there is more of good and 
 happiness in wisdom than of suffering in evils. More- 
 over wisdom makes us to know God and through that 
 knowledge to attain immortality; which is the highest 
 good. Therefore unless we first acquired the knowledge 
 of evil, we could not have acquired the knowledge of 
 good."* The other line of apology is content to rest 
 in a distinction between what God positively wills and 
 what He merely permits as extraneous to His purpose. 
 Thus Clement of Alexandria : "But it is true that noth- 
 ing happens without the will of the Lord of all. It 
 remains to say summarily that such things [evils] hap- 
 pen without the prevention of God, for such a belief 
 alone saves both the Providence and the goodness of 
 God."' 
 
 (c^) In respect to evil in the soul the Stoics are 
 radically inconsistent. Their fatalistic monism leaves 
 no choice in the human will, yet in some way men do 
 choose between a state of mind in harmony with the 
 sum of things and a spirit of individual rebellion or 
 reluctance which has for them all the consequences of 
 evil. 
 
 *De Ira 13. — Compare with this Thomas Aquinas, Summa I, 
 xlvii, 2. 
 
 5 Stromata TV, xii, 86, 
 
238 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 (c^) Here the Neoplatonists also are inconsistent. 
 There is no positive evil, yet their ethic is based on a 
 system of asceticism and of flight from a world the very 
 touch of which is contamination to the soul. 
 
 (d^S^) Epicurus seems to derive the notion of free will 
 from a fortuitous deflection in the motion of the atoms. 
 But the transition from impersonal chance to personal 
 choice is not easily conceivable. There is no real sense 
 of moral evil in his ethics any more than in his physics, 
 although he has much to say about the method of escape 
 from pain and fear. 
 
 (d"8-) Gnostics and Manicheans involve the fate of 
 man in their cosmic theology. In conformity with their 
 conception of a good God and a more or less evil god 
 they commonly divide mankind into a class whose nature 
 is essentially good and a class whose nature is essentially 
 evil. Such a dissociation of the "two natures" removes 
 the question of responsibility from ethics. 
 
 (d^S^) Christians place the origin of evil primarily 
 in the will of man or of some angelic being, and regard 
 cosmic evil as secondary to this. Sin and evil come into 
 the world by Adam, or through Adam by Satan, who 
 both were created free and deliberately chose evil. The 
 dilemma as stated above (b^/?^) thus falls here a fortiori. 
 It is hard to find a plausible reply to the question why a 
 spirit, created without inclination to evil, should with 
 full knowledge of the consequences choose evil. I omit, 
 as abhorrent to reason and conscience, the Calvinistic 
 admission that God for His good pleasure willed the evil 
 choice made by man.*' 
 6 1 am dealing here with the monism of Christian theology. 
 
THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 239 
 
 Now, running the eye again over this scheme, 
 we see that, apart from the Gnostics and the 
 ISIanicheans who may be left out of the accoimt 
 for the present, all these non-Platonic systems 
 are monistic, and that their monism leads to one 
 of two consequences: either they frankly deny 
 the existence of evil, or they admit its existence 
 but then straightway are compelled so to connect 
 it with the supreme cause as virtually to explain 
 it away. In either case the result, logically if 
 not practically, is that evil becomes merely rela- 
 tive and ceases to be regarded as a positive reality 
 in the world and in the soul of man. And I would 
 ask my reader not to dismiss these logical difficul- 
 ties as "academic," a matter of words only; they 
 are far from that. Perhaps the most insidious 
 ally of sin and suffering in the world has been 
 that theory of conduct which is expressed in such 
 popular maxims as these: The end justifies the 
 means, Do evil that good may arise, Let him 
 sow his wild oats, Knowledge of goodness comes 
 through experience of evil, The worst sinner is 
 the best preacher. Wars and persecutions, 
 hideous wide-sweeping devastations, have had 
 their root in just these beliefs; and not public 
 calamities only, but the corruptions of art, the 
 
 There is another whole aspect of Christian philosophy, presented 
 by the Incarnation, which we shall have occasion to consider else- 
 where. 
 
240 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 tragedies of private life, the daily infractions of 
 happiness, have their palliation if not their source 
 in the same paltering with the simple truth that, 
 so far as we can know or guess, evil is eternally 
 evil and good eternally good. It all goes back 
 to, and finds confirmation in, a Jesuitical lie 
 which explains away evil for the greater glory of 
 God. A philosophy that makes the imperfection 
 of the part necessary for the perfection of the 
 whole, or a theology that defends the permission 
 of evil in the world as an instrument of greater 
 good through salvation, cannot be severed from 
 the public adoption of vicious means for the ad- 
 vancement of religion or State, or from the pri- 
 vate indulgence in wickedness or loose conduct as 
 a foundation of character and success. Philoso- 
 phy is the whole of life. The condemnation of 
 such perversions does not mean, of course, that 
 good cannot be wrimg out of evil, or that we may 
 not learn wisdom from our mistakes; but it does 
 mean emphatically that the better way and the 
 higher wisdom and the greater strength and the 
 purer virtue lie in the avoidance, so far as that is 
 humanly possible, of evil and error from the be- 
 ginning : 
 
 "Happier, had it sufficed him to have known 
 Good by itself, and Evil not at all."'^ 
 
 7 Paradise Lost xi, 88. 
 
THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 241 
 
 All monistic theorizing on the ultimate origin 
 of evil turns inevitably to an apology for evil; 
 although it is fair to add that the wiser doctors of 
 Christianity have permitted their deep abhor- 
 rence of sin to thrust itself athwart their meta- 
 physics before the last fatal step was taken. A 
 few of them have perceived the religious con- 
 junction of scepticism {i.e. the admission of our 
 ignorance of ultimate causes) and spiritual af- 
 firmation (i.e. our immediate knowledge of the 
 radical distinction between good and evil) as 
 clearly as ever Socrates did, and thus have main- 
 tained what may be called a secret duahsm as 
 Plato maintained it openly. One preacher of 
 recent years has given noble expression to this 
 truth in words that are at once Platonic in con- 
 ception and Christian in intensity of feeling: 
 "His [Martineau's] general conclusion is that 
 moral evil is not the instrument, but the enemy of 
 God; and if we still ask, 'Whence this foe?' no 
 answer can be given. 'All the ingenuities of logic 
 and of language leave it a mystery still : and it is 
 better to stand within the darkness in the quie- 
 tude of faith, than vainly to search for its margin 
 in the restlessness of knowledge.' "^ 
 
 sLife of James Martineau, by J. Drummond, I, 103.— Prof. 
 Dickinson S. Miller has an excellent article in the first issue of 
 the American Theological Review, on the practical danger of seek- 
 ing solutions for the problem of evil. But I cannot avoid the 
 suspicion that this very danger is proved by some of the con- 
 clusions of his article in the following issue of the magazine. 
 
242 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 Now what Christianity obtained by a certain 
 inconsistency is the consistent basis of Plato's 
 philosophy. His dualism is virtually tantamount 
 to a refusal to deal with the origin of evil meta- 
 physically, recognizing the question as rationally 
 insoluble and not making for edification. His 
 mythology leaves evil in the cosmos as a mys- 
 terious unaccountable fact, for which no person 
 (that is, no conscious will like our own) is re- 
 sponsible. It leaves room for a personal creat- 
 ing God, who is good but not omnipotent in the 
 Christian or metaphysical sense. So in his treat- 
 ment of psychical evil Plato avoids the abyss of 
 monism by distinguishing between the immortal 
 and the mortal elements of the soul, and by the 
 myth of transmigration, which regards the state 
 of any individual soul now as dependent upon its 
 conduct in a past life, and that state on a still 
 previous existence. But along with this meta- 
 physical continence it is a fact that the Dialogues 
 dwell largely on the psychological aspects of the 
 problem — his whole philosophy is predominantly 
 ethical — and our present task is to see how the 
 metaphysical continence of his mythology can be 
 harmonized with his psychological study of 
 causes. 
 
 Socrates, it is well known, identified virtue 
 with knowledge, and Plato took over this dogma 
 as the corner stone of his ethical psychology. An- 
 
THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 243 
 
 other favourite belief of Socrates, apparently, 
 was that no man sinned, or erred, willingly ; and 
 this dogma also was accepted by his pupil without 
 question. Hence we have as our starting point 
 these two theses, the identification of evil with 
 ignorance and the involuntariness of evil, which 
 are succinctly joined together in a statement of 
 the Sophist: "We know that no soul is volun- 228c 
 tarily ignorant of anything." Now what exactly 
 does Plato mean by this involuntary ignorance 
 that hes behind all evil-doing? 
 
 In the discussion in the Laws of the Socratic seooff. 
 sentence that "all evil men in all things are evil 
 unwillingly," Plato considers two aspects of 
 willingness: first, the intention to do an injury, 
 and secondly, the intention to act unjustly; and 
 then makes a like division of injustice (here, as 
 commonly, a general term for evil-doing) into, 
 first, an intentional act of injury, and, secondly, 
 a voluntary state of injustice in the mind of the 
 doer. And in each of these divisions he admits 
 the existence of the first and denies the existence 
 of the second. That is to say, he admits, natur- 
 ally, that men do intentionally injure others and 
 that such injuries may be unjust in fact, but he 
 refuses to admit that, in so acting, men have the 
 will to be unjust, or that their acts are voluntar- 
 ily, from their own point of view, unjust.^ He 
 
 9 The same position is held in Euthyphro 8c. 
 
M4> THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 then proceeds to analyse the motives of these acts 
 of injury, which may be unjust in fact, under 
 three heads : ( 1 ) anger or fear, as a vice of the 
 emotional faculty, or the thymoeides; (2) the 
 desire of pleasure, as a vice of concupiscence, or 
 the e pithy metikon; (3) ignorance, as a vice of 
 the reason. The last motive he subdivides into a 
 simple ignorance (more properly agnoia) of the 
 facts of the case, and a double, or deeper, ignor- 
 ance (more properly amathia) in the very soul 
 of the man, being of the nature of that first false- 
 hood (proton pseudos) which Plato often de- 
 scribes as a state of not knowing what one knows 
 and what one does not know. 
 
 The same triple division is carried through the 
 226c s. elaborate metaphor, in the Sophist, of the purga- 
 tion of evil, the ramifications of which can best be 
 presented by a diagram (p. 245) . 
 
 The purpose of this comparison is to show how 
 evil in the soul is to be cured by a sort of purga- 
 tion (as one branch of the more general art of 
 separation or dividing-out) similar to that em- 
 ployed in healing corruption in the body. For 
 the body there are two arts: medicine, which 
 purges away disease as a surfeit causing a dis- 
 cord among the humours of the body, and gym- 
 nastic, which removes a native deformity, or dis- 
 proportion, of the body itself. Correspondingly, 
 for remedying vice in the soul, we employ punish- 
 
THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 
 
 245 
 
 
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 15 =« 
 
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 c3 5e 
 
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246 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 ment as a medicine to drive out a temporary dis- 
 cord of the faculties, and instruction as a gym- 
 nastic to remove that inner deformity for which 
 another name is ignorance. Further, a study of 
 the text will show that under the sort of psychic- 
 al disease that is to be cured by punishment Plato 
 included the first two forms of injustice described 
 in the Laws as proceeding from anger or fear 
 and from the desire of pleasure, when these swell 
 beyond the control of reason and create a state of 
 discord or faction in the soul. And, again, as in 
 the Laws, the evil of ignorance is subdivided into 
 two classes: (1) the simple ignorance (agjioia) 
 which may be dispelled by instruction in the prac- 
 tical arts and in the relations of life, and (2) the 
 deeper ignorance (amathia) which springs from 
 thinking we know what we do not know, and 
 which is cured by the higher instruction in the 
 form either of admonition or of the peculiar art 
 of conviction by dialectic (the elenchos) em- 
 ployed by Socrates. 
 
 Now from these typical passages of the Laws 
 and the Sophist one's first conclusion might be 
 that Plato set apart surrender to the passions of 
 anger and fear and pleasure as belonging to a 
 different category altogether from ignorance and 
 error of judgment. But that would be to mis- 
 read his real meaning. In other dialogues such 
 a distinction, instead of being maintained, is care- 
 
THE PROBLEM OF EVIL Ml 
 
 fully refined away. So, in the earlier Socratic 
 pieces, bravery and temperance and friendliness 
 appear somehow to be associated with knowledge 
 and their contraries with ignorance. So, more 
 specifically, it is said in the Protagoras that in- assc 
 feriority to one's self, or self -surrender (that is 
 the dominance of the passions), is nothing but 
 ignorance. And again, in the Laws, there is the 689a 
 statement that the worst form of ignorance is 
 when a man does not love, but hates, that which 
 seems to him beautiful and good, while he loves 
 and welcomes that which seems evil and unjust. 
 
 The whole tenor of Plato's philosophy leads to 
 
 the conclusion that all evil in the soul, however 
 various its manifestations may be, is somehow 
 the contrary of knowledge. 
 
 Hence, to return to the diagram of the Sophist, 
 it will be in conformity with Plato's general 
 method to take the analysis of evil as proceeding 
 by way of subsumption rather than by way of ex- 
 clusion. That is to say the ignorance (aiTwihia) 
 which is the ultimate form of evil will not be with- 
 out contact with the other forms of evil, but will 
 be different in order, or precedence ; it is at once 
 a specific kind of vice and the source of all vice, 
 just as vice itself is one, though it has manifold 
 appearances. As seated deep in the reasoning 
 faculty this ignorance is an evil to be cured by 
 the Socratic elenchos, which, by throwing into re- 
 
248 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 lief the self-contradictions of the presumptuously 
 wise, brings them to a state of wholesome humili- 
 ty and renders them amenable to correction. 
 230c "For, as physicians hold that the body can have 
 no enjoyment from proffered nourishment before 
 the internal hindrances are expelled, so the philo- 
 sophic purgers of the soul believe that it can de- 
 rive no benefit from proffered instruction before 
 it is brought to a kind of shame by the elenchos 
 of conviction, and thus, the opinions hostile to in- 
 struction being driven out, it is made pure and 
 thinks it knows only those things which it really 
 knows." In other words, the purging of pre- 
 sumptuous ignorance must precede the instruc- 
 tion in the arts of life, and is the sine qua non of 
 such instruction; and in like manner such a pur- 
 gation must prepare the way for the medicinal 
 chastisement of the soul sick with the passions of 
 anger and fear, pleasure and desire. Punish- 
 ment, in fact, is always taken by Plato as a cor- 
 rective rather than as a vindictive measure, and 
 the penalties imposed on the soul which is, as it 
 were, a victim of its own baser parts, are merely 
 a special and drastic form of the Socratic elen- 
 chos, brought to bear on the faction and self-con- 
 tradiction of moral disease and so arousing the 
 soul to efforts of self-mastery and unison. Until 
 that inner conviction takes place the soul, under 
 the sway of voluntary falsehood, "is content to 
 
THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 249 
 
 wallow like a swinish beast in the mire of ignor- 
 ance, and has no shame at being detected."" 
 
 Knowledge and virtue are identical, but the 
 ignorance which is the fountain-head of evil is not 
 a mere lack of calculation in which the brain alone 
 is concerned. Certainly Plato did not so regard 
 it. Rather it is something which affects the whole 
 soul and all the soul's faculties — a something 
 positive that can be purged away, as the peccant 
 humours of the body are purged, so as to leave 
 the soul in its purity, a true soul "in its philoso- 
 phy," cleansed of the base accretions it has taken 
 into itself and akin to the divine and immortal 
 and that which always is. 
 
 More precisely the nature of this parent of the 
 vices can be gathered by bringing together three 
 
 10 i?epu6h'c 535e: To 8* aKoufftov (i/'cCSos) evKoXwi 7rpo(r8e;^ijTai 
 Koi ifiadaLVOvad irov aXKTKOfxivrj fir) ayavaKTrj, a\k €V)(cpo>s 
 Jicrirtp Orjpiov vciov iv a/MLdia. fioXvvrjrai. — This Platonic mean- 
 ing of a/jbadia, as a stubborn unteachableness rather than passive 
 ignorance, is quite in accord with the normal use of the word in 
 literature. So, for instance, it will be found employed in the 
 tragedies of Euripides to denote a wilful perversion of the mind 
 for which the man is responsible (e.g. Bacchae 490, Madness of 
 Hercules 172, Phoenician Maidens 763). And, passing down the 
 centuries, one can see in Athanasius how this falls in with the 
 constant tendency among the Greeks to assimilate the will and 
 the understanding: "ESct §€ airov's, Xeyovras ^'ftovXrjaei" tov vlov, 
 flTTftv OTi Kttl ^^(j>povrj(TeL' ycyove • ravTov yap rjyovfjuiL <f>p6vr}(Tiv 
 KOI fiovXrjcTiv elvaf o yap /SouAciJcTat Tis, tovto ttcivtws Kal 
 cftpovci" Kot o (f)povei, TOVTO Kol /SouXeuerai (^Contra Ar. iii, 65), 
 
250 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 117. or four scattered passages. In the First Alcibia- 
 des it is said: "You understand, then, that our 
 sins of practice are owing to this ignorance, that 
 we think we know when we do not know"; and 
 73 Id in the Laws this presumption of knowledge is 
 further described thus: "The greatest evil to men, 
 generally, is one which is innate in their souls, 
 and which a man is always excusing in himself 
 and so has no way of escaping. I mean what is 
 expressed in the saying that every man is and 
 ought to be dear to himself. . . . From this same 
 fault arises the common habit of regarding our 
 own ignorance {amatJiia) as iwisdom, and of 
 thinking we know all things when, so to speak, 
 we really know nothing." By this deceit the very 
 desire of enlightenment is killed and philosophy 
 
 Symposium ^g ^^^ Qff ^t thc root : "for herein is the calamity 
 of ignorance {amathia), that he who is neither 
 good nor wise is nevertheless content with him- 
 self ; for feeling no want, he has no desire of that 
 of which he has no conscious need." And by the 
 same conceit he is deprived of religious support 
 in the hour of temptation ; for the baser crimes are 
 
 Laws 8801 Committed by those "who fear not the wrath of 
 the gods or the storied vengeance of the nether 
 world, but, as knowing what they by no means 
 know, despise the ancient and universal belief of 
 mankind." This ignorance is clearly, then, a 
 self-ignorance and is nourished by self-love. It 
 
THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 251 
 
 is the opposite of that scepticism, or humihty of 
 the intellect, which Socrates held to be a twin 
 growth with spiritual insight ; it is the enemy of 
 that command to "know thyself" which the god 
 of Delphi announced as the beginning of religion. 
 In the terms of Plato's philosophy it might be 
 defined as an inherent reluctance of the soul to 
 face honestly the dualism of man's nature, and, 
 under the spur of a noble discontent, to acknow- 
 ledge its own darker member and turn from that 
 to what is akin in itself to the gods. 
 
 The great enemy leagued against the soul, 
 fostering its self-love by treacherous wiles, breed- 
 ing the illusion that it knows what it does not 
 know, disparaging the elenchos that would purge 
 away the deadening humours of self-complai- 
 sance, is flattery. And this foe is not simple, but 
 manifold, insidious, beguiling, threatening. It 
 smiles in every gift of pleasure that bids us barter 
 the future for the present ; it frowns in every ap- 
 proach of pain; in the guise of honour and repu- 
 tation it intrigues with every emotion of pride 
 or resentment or the like that seems to magnify 
 our personal importance. It assumes the garb 
 of philosophy in a thousand maxims, preaching 
 sermons of self-righteousness on such texts as 
 these: that men are naturally virtuous and need 
 only release from constraint to fulfill their nobler 
 destiny, that of our own impulse we are unselfish 
 
252 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 but have been warped by society, that not we but 
 some one else is responsible for the evil we do, that 
 education must be directed to develop our native 
 bent and temperament, that self-respect is not 
 compatible with reverence for authority, that 
 fear is unmanly, that progress is by way of let- 
 ting each man do as he pleases. The air of 
 Athens was full of these flattering voices," which 
 Plato called the utter dishonour of the soul, and 
 which have not ceased to reverberate in the world. 
 They had seized the stronghold of art and letters, 
 and from it they have never been entirely ejected. 
 463a fl. When Plato, in the Gorgias, represents Socrates 
 as defending his own practice against the more 
 popular teachers of the day, he makes the use 
 of flattery the point of distinction. As in the 
 treatment of the body, he says, there is a true 
 science of gymnastic and physic, of which the 
 so-called arts of adormnent and fine cooking are 
 servile imitations, so in matters of the soul there 
 is a true art of law and judgment in opposition 
 to which the professors of literature have set up 
 
 n Athenaeus, who, if any one, ought to have understood the na- 
 ture of flattery, has a striking passage (vi, 65) on^ the progress 
 of the disease in Athens: ToiovTot tot t-ycvovro ol 'he-qvaloi ko\- 
 aKti'as d-qpLOv xaA.£7rwTaTOU Xvaaav ifi/iaXova-rji avTwv Trj ttoXci 
 irepl ^s KaXtus 6 Atoycv?;s eXey* ttoXv KpiiTTOv etvai cs 
 KopaKas oLTreXdiiv rj es KoXaKus. Athenaeus was thinking mainly 
 of flattery in a gross form, but he quotes Plato also, in a way 
 to show that he had some notion of the philosophical import of 
 the word. 
 
THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 253 
 
 their clever tricks of sophistic and rhetoric. And 
 these pseudo-arts can be known by a definite 
 trait, their appeal always is through flattery, open 
 or disguised. So deep-rooted was this corruption 
 that Plato, the master poet of words by nature 
 and practice, did not quail from expelling poetry 
 almost utterly from his city of philosophers.^" 
 
 Those are the enemies from the world, who 
 clamber about the citadel of the soul. But there 
 is a still worse enemy within — that rhathymia, 
 "indolence" or "effeminate slackness," of the soul 
 itself; "the master vice of all our business," as 
 Burke calls it, "degenerate and inglorious sloth." 
 The word rhathymia is not frequent in Plato's 
 Dialogues, but the idea is emphatically there, and 
 its force may best be understood by glancing first 
 at the ethical psychology of a late Christian ora- 
 tor, St. Chrysostom, who in many respects was 
 a faithful interpreter of the Platonic tradition. 
 
 For the natural history of evil, as Chrysostom 
 understood it, we need go no further than his 
 three great sermons, the fourteenth (Field) on 
 Romans and the second and fifth on Ephesians. 
 
 12 Plato's serious and final objection to poetry and the arts, as 
 shown in the tenth book of The Republic, is owing to their ten- 
 dency to flatter the emotional side of the soul and so to make 
 rational self-control more difficult. Plutarch has an interesting 
 passage, too long to quote, at the beginning of his Quomodo 
 Adulator, on the Platonic connexion of ignorance, self-love 
 {(fnXavria) , and flattery. 
 
254 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 According to the view here followed, as in all 
 orthodox writing, the world is in the completest 
 sense a creation of God, and as such is originally 
 altogether good. Spirit and soul, as they spring 
 into existence at the word of the Creator, are 
 instinct with virtue and incline to that love and 
 sympathy which are the fulfilment of the law. 
 Neither is evil inherent in the flesh or in what we 
 call nature. The desires associated with the body 
 are intrinsically without blame, and the good life 
 is that which is in accordance with nature, where- 
 as the evil life is contrary to nature. So much 
 must be held by any theist who takes an all-wise 
 and all-powerful Deity as the starting point of his 
 speculation. But Chrysostom, as an orthodox 
 Christian, is equally convinced of the heinous 
 reality of sin and of man's responsibility therefor ; 
 and to explain this perversion of human nature 
 he has recourse to two expedients, which he min- 
 gles together without being aware of their mutual 
 incompatibility. By one of these man is created 
 with a free power of choice and deliberately 
 chooses evil as his portion. The operation of this 
 choice is through the imagination, which corrupts 
 the naturally healthy desires of the flesh. Thus, 
 to take the illustration familiar to Chrysostom, 
 the sexual impulse is implanted in the body by 
 God for worthy ends, but by the imagination the 
 
THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 255 
 
 soul corrupts this natural desire to a lust for un- 
 natural and illicit satisfactions. 
 
 But along with this theory of deliberate choice 
 Chrysostom had another explanation of evil based 
 on the notion of subordination (hypotage) . The 
 flesh, with its desires, he still asserts, is as created 
 intrinsically good, but it is of an inferior order 
 to the soul, and retains its goodness only so long 
 as this subordination endures. Evil, then, would 
 be a kind of rebellion, by which the inferior part- 
 ner of the corporation, so to speak, assumes 
 authority and shakes off the regulating control 
 of its natural ruler. But the responsibility for 
 this inversion of order lies, again, not upon the 
 flesh, which is endowed only with impulse and is 
 without the principle of restraint, but upon the 
 soul, which by its indolence suffers its delegated 
 power of restraint to sink away." Hence arise 
 the excess of desire and the tendency to limitless 
 expansion of which is wrought all our misery. 
 Why the body should contain this innate ten- 
 dency to excess, which is the matter if not the 
 cause of evil, Chrysostom does not explain, nor 
 could he easily explain it while remaining true to 
 his theory of creation. Attributing evil to the 
 soul, however, he can speak of it, not as a matter 
 of deliberate choice, but as the result of a de- 
 
 13 7re Galat. 7:20b: Tovto Se ov (Twixaro<: KaTrjyopLa, aXXa pa- 
 dvfxov ^vx^<: lyK\r]fJM,. 
 
256 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 ficiency of energy (rhathymia) , a failure of at- 
 tention.^* 
 
 / This is the theory of evil, as a failure of the 
 negative will, or will to refrain, rather than a vice 
 of the positive will, which Chrysostom stresses; 
 it is in accordance with such a view that he sees 
 our peril less in the violent temptations, whose 
 very magnitude, striking an innocent soul, would 
 frighten it from a course of sin, than in those 
 little relaxations which individually seem of no 
 importance, but gradually form a habit of indif- 
 ference and in the end leave the soul without 
 power of resistance/^ By this indolence the law 
 of God is made of no avail/® 
 
 Now eliminate from Chrysostom's ethical 
 theory the metaphysical ideas of God and crea- 
 tion, and you will have remaining the doctrine of 
 pure Platonism. It is this rhathymia that leads 
 
 ^* 'Airpoaeiia, In Ephes. 37c, et passim. 
 
 15 See, e.g., In Mat. 815a, and In Rom. 554ce. 
 
 16 /n Rom, 557d: 1l66ev ovv rj afnapTia yiyoxxv, et ovru) Oav- 
 fxaaTO<; 6 SiSdaKoXos (i-e. 6 vo/*os); irapa. Trjv twv fiadriTwv 
 p^Ovfiiav. What follows bears on the relation between rhathymia 
 and ignorance. The interest of Chrysostom is almost purely 
 psychological; he was the Christian preacher par excellence. But 
 in some of the earlier theologians, beginning with Clement of 
 Alexandria (Strom. VII, vii, 46: otSev yap Kal tS>v dyyeXtDV 
 Tivas vTTo pa6vixLa<i oXiaOrjaavTas . . .), and continuing through 
 Origen and Athanasius, the notion of rhathymia is carried back 
 into the cosmic drama of the Fall. The further exposition of the 
 subject must be reserved for a later volume. 
 
THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 257 
 
 men to rest lazily in a materialistic philosophy, Phaedo 99b 
 explaining their actions by those mechanical 
 causes which are first visible to the eye, and for- 
 going the search after the ethical motives which 
 are the true springs of our life. It is against the 
 innate indolence of the will that the whole scheme 
 of Platonic education is directed. In The Re- aucs. 
 public a severe training in resistance and endur- 
 ance is prescribed for the rulers to the end that 
 they may be rendered impervious to the flattery 
 and juggling deceits of pleasure; and the final 
 test of the guardian of the State is his abiUty to 
 guard within his soul the deposit of the truth 
 against. all the seductions of time. So the down- 
 ward course of the soul and the State, in what 
 may be called the Tyrant's Progress of the eighth 
 and ninth books, follows a successive yielding to 
 the indulgence of temperament. The elaborate 
 discipline of the Laws in the choice of pleasures 
 and pains looks to a strengthening of that part 
 of the soul which imposes a due check on the out- 
 reaching desires. Everywhere in the Dialogues 
 the life of philosophy is represented as a death- 
 less battle within the fortress of the soul, a con- 
 stant warfare, in which vigilance is the price of 
 liberty. Few are the victors, but the reward is ^^^^^° n^c 
 fair and great the hope." 
 
 17 The connexion of this theory of rhathymia with Aristotle's 
 doctrine of ivepyeia, and with the Stoic conception of acrOiveia 
 
258 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 So, I think, we can understand what Plato 
 meant by identifying vice with a kind of ignor- 
 ance that must be purged away. Many of the 
 mishaps of hfe, the wrongs that so easily might 
 have been avoided, he would attribute to ignor- 
 ance in the simplest sense of the word, — the ig- 
 norance of circumstances, of means, of persons, 
 the fumbling of inexperience, the stupidity of the 
 well-intentioned : 
 
 "Our faults no tenderness should ask. 
 
 The chastening stripes must cleanse them all; 
 But for our blunders — oh, in shame 
 Before the eyes of heaven we fall. 
 
 "Earth bears no balsam for mistakes; 
 
 Men crown the knave, and scourge the tool 
 That did his will ; but Thou, O Lord, 
 Be merciful to me, a fool!"^^ 
 
 But behind these more or less venial errors lies 
 the dark reach of an ignorance like a mist in the 
 soul spreading from its self-love and indolence, as 
 from a noisome stagnant pool, a mist wherein the 
 pleasures near at hand loom up in exaggerated 
 magnitude, while the remoter consequences are 
 
 or irovia as the cause of irdOr), need only be mentioned. An in- 
 teresting parallel also might be drawn with the pamdda of Bud- 
 dhism and the accidia of medieval theology, 
 
 18 From The Fool's Prayer of Edward Rowland Sill. 
 
THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 259 
 
 not seen at all or are beheld vaguely as unreal 
 phantoms." Hence that illusion of the near and 
 the far, the skiagraphia of a misleading perspec- 
 tive, as Plato was fond of describing it, which 
 distorts the facts of life and renders us a prey to 
 the flattery of the present and to immediate solici- 
 tations. And in that cloud the soul is benumbed ^""'''^"^ 273c 
 by a kind of lethean torpor into forgetfulness of 
 itself and of its dower of happiness, of its God 
 and of the eternal laws implanted in it originally 
 as a memory to be clung to strenuously through 
 all the vicissitudes of birth and rebirth. And so, 
 by this initial lack of attention, we fall into that 
 proton pseudos, the first lie, of the soul that 
 knows not what it knows and does not know. 
 For this perversion of ignorance the soul is re- 
 sponsible, since the cause is entirely within itself. 
 Yet in a way, too, the evil may be said to be in- 
 voluntary, since it is not a willing choice of the 
 soul, but, as it were, a failure to choose at all, a 
 mere sluggish drifting with the tides of tempera- 
 ment. 
 
 So far Plato carries the analysis of evil, to the 
 ignorance that is involved in self-love and rhathy- 
 mia beginning somewhere in the far backward 
 
 ^^ Laios 875b: H 6vr}Tr] c^vcris, . . . (f>evyovaa fiev dXdyws rrjv 
 XvTTijv, SiwKOva-a §€ Tr]v ^Sovqv, Tov 8e SiKaiorepov re Kal d/Attvovos 
 iiriTTpoddtv afxffidi tovtw TrpocTT/crtTat, Kal (tkotos dir(pya^ofi(vr] iv 
 avTrj irdvTwv kukujv ifiirXriutL tt/oos to tcXos avTi^v T« KoX rrjv 
 TToXtv o\r]V. 
 
260 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 and abysm of time; but if you inquire into the 
 further cause of this failure of the inhibiting will, 
 there is no answer given in the Dialogues, nor do 
 I think you will find satisfaction elsewhere. 
 Plato has traced the stream to the last discover- 
 able source in the consciousness of the soul itself, 
 and to seek to go beyond that is to pass into the 
 emptiness of metaphysics. As we have seen, it 
 is tempting to explain the defection of the will 
 and the ignorance of self-love as belonging to the 
 dark Necessity of the phenomenal work of crea- 
 tion, and such an explanation is sound to this 
 extent, that moral evil also goes back to a prin- 
 ciple of spontaneous disorder. But the analogy 
 breaks down, for the reason that the Necessity of 
 nature is one term of an outer dualism, of which 
 the Creator is the other term, whereas the im- 
 pulses of disorder and of the refraining will are 
 both in the soul itself, members of its constitu- 
 tion. 
 
 In the long course of metempsychosis, as we 
 pass through the calamities of successive lives, 
 Plato believed that the soul could be trained and 
 frightened into heedfulness, and might awake at 
 the last to a reahzation of its happiness. Then, 
 as Plato says in the language of mythology, it 
 shall be brought back in its purity to the star in 
 which its immortal part was born and where it 
 was indoctrinated in the everlasting truths which 
 
THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 261 
 
 it seems to have lost in this world, or holds so 
 precariously. Meanwhile philosophy is the clear 
 and present call to the soul to shake off its lethar- 
 gy of ignorance, if it may learn a little of itself 
 and its destinies. And fortunate the man who in 
 this life finds a monitor, whether it be the still 
 voice within his own breast or a friendly Socra- 
 tes, to warn him of his peril before the twilight 
 darkens into night. "There is one who cares for isod* " 
 you. But it seems to me that, as in the Homeric 
 story Athena took away the mist from the eyes 
 of Diomed, 
 
 'In order that he might know well both god and man/ 
 
 SO this monitor of yours must first remove from 
 your soul the mist which now envelops it, and 
 then, in good time, he shall bring to you the know- 
 ledge both of evil and of good." 
 
CHAPTER X 
 THE RELIGIOUS LIFE 
 
 TRANSLATION FROM LAWS IV AND V 
 
 [The concluding paragraphs of the fourth 
 book of the Laws and the opening paragraphs 
 of the fifth are in the nature of a general pre- 
 amble, a kind of preface thrown, Shandean-like, 
 into the midst of the work. In substance this 
 section forms a unit with the tenth book, and in 
 the order of thought follows the exposition of the 
 three theological theses. Here, as in the tenth 
 book, the Athenian Stranger is expounding his 
 views to his Lacedaemonian and Cretan com- 
 rades.] 
 
 Book IV 
 
 71SE O men, we shall say to them, God, as the an- 
 
 cient report is, holding the beginning and the end 
 
 716 and the middle of all things that are, moves 
 straight on to his goal by the seemingly devious 
 ways of nature;' and with him follows always 
 
 lA passage much quoted by the Fathers; see, for instance, 
 Clemens Alex., Protrepticus vi, 69. The last phrase, of disputed 
 meaning, is thus translated in the old Latin version of Irenaeus 
 (III, xli Harvey): Et Deus quidem, quemadmodum et vetus ser- 
 mo est, initium et finem et medietates omnium quae sunt habcns, 
 recte perficit, secundum naturam circumiens. 
 
 262 
 
LAWS, IV AND V 263 
 
 Justice, the avenger of those that depart from 
 the divine law. To this Justice he that will be 
 happy clings, and follows with her, humble and 
 chastened. But another man, being lifted up by 
 pride, or exalted by money or honours, or even 
 by the beauty of body when young and foolish, 
 is inflamed in soul and made insolent, as if he 
 needed no ruler or guide, but were himself fit to 
 guide others. He is left desolate of God, and 
 being so left and drawing after him others of 
 like nature, wantons and throws all things into 
 confusion; and to many of a sort he seems to be 
 somebody, but after a time, and that not long, he 
 succumbs to the unblamable vengeance of Justice, 
 and brings himself and his house and city to utter 
 ruin. Since then the laws are so ordered, what 
 should the wise man do and have in mind, and 
 what not? 
 
 In a word, what course of action is dear and 
 consonant to God? One course there is, having 
 warrant in one ancient report, that like will be 
 dear to like, being measured, whereas things 
 unmeasured will be dear neither to one another 
 nor to the measured. Now God in a special sense 
 would be for us the measure of all things, and in 
 a way that no man,^ as they say, can be. He 
 
 2 Plato has dealt at length in the Theaetetus with the Prota- 
 gorean doctine of man as the measure of all things used as an 
 argument for relativity. 
 
717 
 
 264 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 therefore who will be dear to such a one must 
 himself become such another; and it follows that 
 he of us who is temperate is dear to God, being 
 like, and the intemperate is unlike and hostile, as 
 is the unjust, and so on with the other virtues and 
 vices. Wherefore let us hold to this report as 
 agreeing with what has been said, the fairest and 
 truest, I think, of all reports, that to make sacri- 
 fice and always to have intercourse with the gods 
 by prayer and offering and all divine service is 
 for the good man the fairest and best and most 
 effective instrument of the happy life, as it is 
 preeminently suitable to him; while to the bad 
 man the way is just the contrary. For the bad 
 man is impure of soul, whereas the good man is 
 pure, and it is never right that a good man or a 
 god should receive gifts from the unclean; so 
 that for the unholy much pains about the gods 
 is labour wasted, but for all holy men most profit- 
 able. This, then, is the mark at which we ought 
 to aim; but what are the words that would go 
 like missiles straight to the goal? 
 
 In the first place we say that a man would hit 
 the mark of piety most squarely by setting aside 
 for the nether gods things of even number and 
 second rank and sinister omen, as subordinate to 
 the honours due to the Olympian deities and 
 those that guard the city, reserving for these lat- 
 ter the superior and contrary things. After these 
 
LAWS, IV AND V 265 
 
 gods the thoughtful man will worship the dae- 
 mons, and after them the heroes. Next to these 
 should come the special altars of the paternal 
 gods, consecrated by law, and then honours to liv- 
 ing parents. For it is right that a debtor should 
 pay the first and greatest of his debts, of all obli- 
 gations the most ancient, and that he should hold 
 all his possessions as the property of those who 
 begot and nourished him, to be rendered to them 
 in service with all diligence — first his goods, then 
 his body, and thirdly the things of the soul — re- 
 paying as debts contracted in his youth the an- 
 cient cares and pangs of those who suffered for 
 him, and making return to the old in their time 
 of need. Through the whole course of hfe his 
 parents should have had and should have from 
 him the greatest courtesy of speech, since heavy 
 indeed may be the penalty of light winged words 
 (over all these Nemesis, the angel of Justice, is 
 appointed guardian) ; and he should yield to his 
 parents when they are angry, and when they 
 wreak their anger and take it out in words or 
 deeds, remembering submissively that it is right 
 and natural for a father to be highly angered with 
 a son who in his opinion has wronged him. When 
 parents die, the most temperately conducted 
 funeral is the fairest, one that neither surpasses 
 the customary display, nor falls behind what our 
 ancestors have done at the burial of their parents. 
 
266 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 In like manner we should perform such annual 
 ceremonies for the dead as will keep their honour 
 alive ; and in this we most honour them, in main- 
 718 taining their memory fresh and in expending 
 upon them, when their toils are over, according 
 to the measure of our fortune. By such acts and 
 by such a life we shall each of us receive from the 
 gods our due reward and from our betters, pass- 
 ing the most part of our existence in good 
 hopes. ... 
 
 BookV 
 
 726 Hearken now every one who heard what was 
 said concerning the gods and our own dear fore- 
 fathers ! 
 
 Of all a man's possessions, after the gods, his 
 soul is the most godhke, being his truest self. 
 To every man his all is dual. To the stronger and 
 better things pertains mastery, to the lesser and 
 baser servitude; wherefore always a man should 
 honour the master parts of himself above the 
 servile. And thus my exhortation is justified 
 when I declare that the second honour belongs 
 
 727 to a man's own soul after the gods, who are our 
 masters, and after their subordinates. Yet no one 
 of us, I might almost say, gives honour rightly, 
 however it may seem. For honour is in a way a 
 divine good, and bears with it nothing of evil; 
 and he who thinks to magnify the soul by any 
 
LAWS, IV AND V 267 
 
 words or gifts or by yielding to it in any way,^ 
 without rendering it better than it was, seems to 
 honour it, but in no wise does so. Every man, 
 even when a child, believes himself capable of 
 knowing all things, and thinks to honour his soul 
 by praising it, and is zealous to permit it to act 
 in whatever way it desires; whereas the present 
 argument avers that by doing this he injures his 
 soul instead of honouring it, though, as we say, 
 the soul deserves the second honour after the 
 gods. Neither when a man thinks that he himself 
 is not responsible for his various sins and the 
 many and great evils of his life, but holds others 
 responsible and always excepts himself as guilt- 
 less, neither then does he honour his soul, as he 
 believes, but quite otherwise; for he injures it. 
 Neither when he indulges in pleasures contrary 
 to the advice and commendation of the lawgiver, 
 does he then really honour his soul, but does it 
 dishonour by filling it with evils and remorse. 
 Neither on the other hand when he endures not 
 
 ^ Ttalv VTreL^€aiv. There is scarcely a phrase that touches 
 more closely than this the quick of Plato's religion. As he in- 
 sists in the Oorgias and the Sophist and in a hundred other 
 places, all the power of false philosophy, all the seduction of 
 base literature, is in this trick of flattering the soul by bidding 
 it forget its dual nature and yield to its egotistic impulses. He 
 who has looked deeply and fearlessly enough into his own heart 
 to discover there the buried roots of self-flattery is a dualist, 
 and I do not know that philosophy means much more than this. 
 ^lAoCTo^ta 8c oi KoAoKcuei, says Clement. 
 
268 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 to go through the labours commended by the 
 lawgiver and the fears and pains and hardships, 
 but gives way, does he honour the soul by yield- 
 ing; for he renders it dishonoured by all such 
 acts. Neither does he honour it, when he thinks 
 that life at any cost is good, but then also he dis- 
 honours it; for, with a soul that looks upon all 
 that may happen in Hades as evil, he yields and 
 offers no resistance, instead of instructing it and 
 bringing it to the conviction that in reality it 
 does not know whether these things that happen 
 under the gods of the nether world may not be 
 the greatest of all blessings, rather than evils.* 
 Neither, again, when any one honours beauty 
 above virtue, is this aught but the real and utter 
 dishonour of the soul. For such a belief says that 
 the body is more honourable than the soul, yet 
 lies, since nothing born of earth is more hon- 
 ourable than the Olympians, and he that believes 
 otherwise concerning the soul knows not that he 
 is neglecting this most marvellous possession.^ 
 Neither when one has his heart set on gaining 
 728 money, save by fair means, or is even at ease with 
 
 4 This was the thought that gave Socrates courage to follow 
 the command of the god through many dangers and to face with 
 a smile of contempt the ordeal of trial and death. See the 
 Apology 29a. 
 
 5 Clement, Prot. iv: Tot€ aov yviapiao} to KaAAos, ore Kadapav 
 T€T-^pr]Kai rrjv cixova. — Marcus Aurelius iii, 2: Tow iavrov 
 (T(i}tf)po(nv 6(f>da\p.oli opav. 
 
LAWS, IV AND V 269 
 
 such gaining, does he then bestow gifts of honour 
 upon his soul ; rather, he degrades it thereby, sell- 
 ing what is precious and fair in the soul at the 
 price of a little gold, whereas all the gold on 
 the earth and under the earth is not equal in 
 value to virtue. 
 
 And, to sum up in a word, certain things the 
 lawgiver has enumerated and laid down as shame- 
 ful and evil and certain other things as good and 
 fair, and he who does not set his whole mind on 
 abstaining from the former and on practicing 
 the latter to the extent of his power, is ignorant 
 of the fact that any man in such a state is most 
 dishonourably and disgracefully disposed in that 
 most divine part of himself, the soul. No one, 
 I might almost say, calculates the greatest award 
 of justice, to use the common phrase, upon evil- 
 doing; and this is the award, great indeed, that 
 he is made like to men who are evil, and, being 
 like to these, flees from good men and good 
 words, and severs himself, while he attaches him- 
 self to the evil by pursuing their society. So, 
 by joining himself to such men, he is obliged to 
 do and suffer what it is the nature of such men 
 to do and say to one another. Yet, properly 
 speaking, what happens to them is not the award 
 of justice — for justice and its award is a fair 
 thing — but vengeance, which follows as the re- 
 sult of injustice. And he that undergoes this ven- 
 
no THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 geance is miserable, as is he that escapes it, the 
 one because he perishes in order that many may 
 be saved, the other because he is left without 
 healing." And, in a word, our honour is to fol- 
 low the better things, and to do what we can 
 that the evil which is curable may thus turn out 
 for the better. 
 
 Now the soul is the possession of a man above 
 all adapted by nature to flee evil and to pursue 
 and capture the supreme good, and having cap- 
 tured it to dwell in its company the remainder of 
 his life. Wherefore the soul stands second in 
 honour [to the gods], and third, as every one 
 will admit, is the natural honour of the body. 
 But it still remains to examine the honours [of 
 the body], and to determine which of them are 
 genuine and which are counterfeit, and this is 
 the business of the lawgiver. Now to me he 
 seems to indicate their character in this way : the 
 body is honourable not when it is fair or strong or 
 swift or great or even healthy — though such 
 would be the opinion of many — nor yet when it 
 shows the opposite qualities ; but the middle state 
 of habit in all such cases is the most temperate 
 and at the same time far the safest, for the one 
 
 6 This is a favourite thought of Plato, that punishment should 
 be welcomed as a measure of drastic healing, and that he who 
 escapes the penalty of wrong-doing is the more to be pitied, 
 being left, for the time at least, to harden in sin. See Oorgiag 
 476a ff. 
 
LAWS, IV AND V 271 
 
 extreme puffs up the soul and makes it arrogant, 
 while the other renders it mean and illiberal. 
 Money and possessions generally are subject to 
 the same rule, to be honoured in the same pro- 
 portion. For excess in all such things creates 
 faction and enmities in cities and in individuals, 729 
 while deficiency for the most part produces ser- 
 vility. No one therefore should be always piling 
 up money, that he may leave his children as rich 
 as possible; such wealth is an advantage neither 
 to them nor to the city. Rather, wealth that will 
 not attract flatterers about the young, yet is suf- 
 ficient for real needs, this is of all best fitted for 
 what might be called the harmony of existence, 
 for, being in tune with our nature and fitted for 
 all chances, it makes life easy and painless. A 
 treasure of modesty, not of gold, we should leave 
 to our children. And such an inheritance we sup- 
 pose we shall prepare by rebuking the young 
 whenever they show disrespect; but this result 
 does not come from harping on the sort of admo- 
 nition now common, that youth should always be 
 respectful. The wise lawgiver will rather advise 
 the old to show respect for the young, and to be 
 most particular that no youth should ever see or 
 hear them doing or saying anything base, since 
 wherever age is shameless, there youth is certain 
 to be without modesty. So true is it that the bet- 
 ter instruction of both the young and their elders 
 
272 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 is not in giving admonition but in being seen 
 throughout life to do those things which one 
 would admonish another to do. 
 
 By honouring and reverencing one's kindred 
 and all those who are united by blood and by com- 
 munity of worship a man will have these gods of 
 the family and of birth correspondingly propi- 
 tious for the begetting of children. So too will 
 he win friends and comrades for the kindly inter- 
 course of life, if he esteems their services to him 
 as greater and more imposing than they do, while 
 of his own favours to his friends and comrades 
 he thinks less than of their favours to him. In 
 relation to his city and fellow citizens he is by 
 far the best man who, before the victory at Olym- 
 pia or in any other of the warlike and peaceful 
 contests, would prefer to be victor in the repu- 
 tation for serving the home laws, as the one who 
 had served these in his life the most nobly of all 
 men. 
 
 We must consider that the most sacred of busi- 
 ness dealings are those with foreigners; since 
 these are under a god's care, whose vengeance is 
 quicker upon all sins touching foreigners than 
 upon those touching citizens. This is because the 
 foreigner, being devoid of comrades and kinsmen, 
 is more an object of pity to men and gods. He 
 that is abler to avenge is more zealous to help, 
 and there is none so able and zealous as the pe- 
 
LAWS, IV AND V 273 
 
 culiar daemon and god of the foreigner who fol- "° 
 low in the train of Zeus the Protector. He, then, 
 who has a spark of prudence will be very cau- 
 tious to make his journey to the end of life with- 
 out committing any of the sins against foreign- 
 ers. But of the sins touching either foreigners 
 or citizens that is the greatest which concerns sup- 
 pliants of any sort ; for the god who is witness to 
 an agreement made with a suppliant becomes the 
 suppliant's special guardian, and will not leave 
 him unavenged if any wrong, even the least, be- 
 fall him. 
 
 So much for the obligations that concern 
 one's parents and one's self and one's possessions, 
 the city and friends and kindred, in matters for- 
 eign and domestic. We have finished these in a 
 way, and it now remains to consider the charac- 
 ter itself of the man who would conduct his life 
 in the fairest manner. Our next subject there- 
 fore will be the training which comes to us rather 
 through the influence of praise and blame than 
 directly from the laws, but which renders us more 
 amenable and docile to the laws when passed. 
 Now truth is the beginning of all good to the 
 gods, of all good to men; he who will be blessed 
 and happy will lay hold of it at the earliest mo- 
 ment, in order that he may live a true man for the 
 greatest length of time. So will he be trusted; 
 whereas he is without trust who loves voluntary 
 
274 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 falsehood, and he who loves involuntary false- 
 hood is a fool — neither of whom is enviable. For 
 a man without trust or a fool has no friends; as 
 time goes on he is found out, having prepared 
 for himself a perfect solitude and a hard old age 
 when years are upon him, when his life shall be 
 as it were orphaned equally whether his acquaint- 
 ance and children are living or dead. 
 
 He indeed is worthy of honour who does no 
 injustice, but he is doubly worthy, and more, 
 who does not even permit the unjust to carry out 
 their evil intentions; for the former stands for 
 himself alone, while the latter stands for many 
 besides himself, by keeping the injustice of others 
 before the magistrates. And he who to the best 
 of his power assists the magistrates in meting out 
 punishment, the great man and perfect citizen, he 
 shall be proclaimed victor in the contest of virtue.^ 
 The same commendation should be bestowed up- 
 on temperance and wisdom, and upon all the ex- 
 cellences possessed by a man which are of a kind 
 to be shared with others as well as enjoyed by 
 himself. He who communicates them should re- 
 ceive the highest honour; he who is willing to 
 communicate but lacks ability should be left to 
 the second honour; the envious man, who is un- 
 
 7 It should be remembered that there was no public prosecutor 
 in the Greek city, and that the indictment of even such crimes 
 as treason depended on the initiative of private citizens. 
 
LAWS, IV AND V «76 
 
 willing in the way of friendship to share any ex- 
 cellence he may possess, deserves censure as a 
 man, yet the possession of virtue itself must not 
 suffer dishonour on his account, being still a thing 
 to acquire with all diligence. Let every man in 
 our city be ambitious of excellence without envy. 
 Such a one magnifies a State, contending for his 
 own honour, while not curtailing the honour of 
 others by slander. But the envious man, who 
 thinks he must excel by lowering the reputation 
 of others, is himself less ardent in the race for 
 genuine excellence, and by his slanders takes the 
 spirit out of his competitors; thus rendering the 
 whole city indifferent in the contest of virtue, 
 and doing what he can to destroy its good name. 
 Indignation is a faculty every man should own, 
 yet meek too he must be so far as possible.^ For 
 we have no way to ward off the inveterate and 
 hardly cured, or irremediable, injustice of others 
 save by fighting and defending ourselves victori- 
 ously and by letting no wrong go unpunished ; and 
 no one can be successful in this without the spirit 
 of generous indignation in his soul. As for the 
 deeds of the unjust which are yet remediable, 
 know first of all that every unjust man is unjust 
 
 8 This union of meekness with the faculty of indignation occurs 
 constantly in Plato as a type, or the fountain head, of the ethical 
 mean which was to be worked out by Aristotle in detail for all 
 the virtues. See next chapter, note 3. 
 
 731 
 
276 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 involuntarily ; for of a surety no one would ever 
 take to himself voluntarily the greatest of evils, 
 least of all in the most honourable parts of him- 
 self. But the soul, as we have said, is veritably 
 to all men the most honoured thing they possess, 
 and it is inconceivable that anyone should vol- 
 untarily admit the greatest evil into this most 
 honoured part of himself, and live his hfe through 
 with such a possession. No doubt every unjust 
 man and every one who harbours in himself evil 
 things is pitiable; yet it behooves us to pity the 
 evil man only so long as there is hope of remedy. 
 For such a one we should keep our indignation 
 gentle by restraint, and not grow bitter like a 
 woman and yield to relentless rage, which ought 
 to be reserved for the transgressor whose evil is 
 unamenable to reason or control. Wherefore we 
 say that it becomes the good man, whatever may 
 happen, to have the spirit both of indignation and 
 of meekness. 
 
 The greatest evil to men, generally, is one 
 which is innate in their souls, and which a man is 
 always excusing in himself and so has no way of 
 escaping. I mean what is expressed in the say- 
 ing that every man is and ought to be dear to 
 himself. Whereas the truth is that this absorb- 
 ing self-love is continually and in all men the 
 cause of all their faults ; for the lover is blinded in 
 regard to the object of his passion, so that he is 
 
LAWS, IV AND V 277 
 
 a bad judge of the just and the good and the 
 beautiful, always fancying that he ought to 732 
 honour what belongs to him above the truth. Yet, 
 really, he who would be a great man ought not to 
 cherish himself or his possessions, but the things 
 that are just, whether they pertain to himself or 
 to the conduct of another. From this same fault 
 arises the common habit of regarding our own 
 ignorance as wisdom, and of thinking we know 
 all things when, so to speak, we really know 
 nothing. 
 
CHAPTER XI 
 
 RELIGIOUS LIFE : WORSHIP 
 
 Hitherto we have been studying the religion 
 of Plato in its component elements — philosophy, 
 theology, mythology — keeping these apart so 
 far as their nature and overlapping would per- 
 mit. It was, we observed, a notable character- 
 istic of Plato's method that his tone varied in 
 assurance and directness as one or another of 
 these components was the subject of his dis- 
 course. But though rehgion may be thus ana- 
 lysed into its elements, still no one of these ele- 
 ments alone is religion in any full or satisfactory 
 sense — not philosophy, which, pursued separate- 
 ly, leaves the soul friendless in a world of austere 
 impersonal law; not theology, which of itself is 
 in danger of forgetting the eternal primacy of 
 the moral law; not mythology alone, which too 
 easily falls into a vain, even a degrading, super- 
 stition. Nor yet is religion a mechanical juxta- 
 position of the three, but an emotion, an aspira- 
 tion, a faith, a knowledge, a life, a something 
 born of their intimate union and cooperation. 
 Our last task will be to consider a little more close- 
 
 278 
 
WORSHIP 279 
 
 ly how these constituents of rehgion are blended 
 together, while retaining their individual note. 
 
 The beginning of the religious life is in that 
 right honour of the soul which Plato connects 
 with his philosophy of dualism: "To every man 
 his all is dual. To the stronger and better things 
 pertains mastery, to the lesser and baser servi- 
 tude ; wherefore always a man should honour the 
 master parts of himself above the servile." To 
 honour the soul is to make righteousness the end 
 of life, and the reward at once and measure of 
 righteousness is happiness. That would seem to 
 be the full circle of Plato's philosophy so far as 
 it belongs to religion — a thesis so simple in ap- 
 pearance that many may pass it by as common- 
 place or reject it as insignificant. But within 
 this circle there is range for endless experience 
 and reflection, as he will find who attempts to 
 walk therein. He will soon learn, for instance, 
 that happiness is entangled in a vast network of 
 pleasures, some of them strangely like happiness, 
 others appearing as hideous caricatures of it, and 
 that to see clearly in this confusion of feelings 
 requires the last refinement of wisdom, a self- 
 knowledge which comes only after much intro- 
 spection and abstinence, or sometimes, as Plato 
 would say, by a divine gift. And, again, right- 
 eousness is so involved in artificial standards of 
 virtue as to seem to all but the most steadfast 
 
280 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 souls itself no more than a product of ever-shift- 
 ing opinion. Only when happiness has been dis- 
 tinguished from pleasure and confirmed by self- 
 knowledge will righteousness be set free from the 
 flux of opinions about right and wrong as a truth 
 immutable and eternal, a law not made by man or 
 subject to his choice, not even definable by man 
 in its essential nature though still discoverable 
 everywhere in its operation. 
 
 But this "philosophy of the soul" takes on the 
 colour of religion when it is regarded as subor- 
 dinate to the honour of the divine soul whom we 
 call God; for God is greater than man. "No 
 Laws 885b ouc," says Plato, "who believes in the existence 
 of the gods as by law and custom established has 
 ever voluntarily done an impious deed or uttered 
 a lawless word. If he has done so it is for one of 
 three reasons: either he does not believe in the 
 existence of the gods, as I said, or, secondly, he 
 believes that they exist but have no care for men, 
 or, thirdly, that they are placable and can be 
 turned from their course by sacrifice and 
 prayers." Now Plato does not here assert that 
 a man may not from philosophy alone pursue a 
 just and noble life — such an assertion would run 
 counter to the great hypothesis of The Republic 
 — but his words do imply that philosophy ac- 
 quires a powerful confirmation in the right kind 
 of theological belief, and that such a belief, if 
 
WORSHIP 281 
 
 raised on the foundation of philosophical know- 
 ledge, will save a man from all presmnptuous 
 sin, that is to say, will turn the tide of a man's 
 being steadfastly away from sin towards holi- 
 ness. By the right kind of belief Plato did not 
 mean that empty lip-acknowledgment of the 
 semi-atheists who relegated the gods to some in- 
 termundane region of slothful ease, while de- 
 volving all the government of the world upon 
 chance or mechanical law; his belief was close 
 to the faith of St. Paul. And, further, this be- 
 lief cannot be severed from philosophy ; the gods 
 are inexorably, implacably just, because the law 
 of justice is no more their creation than it is 
 man's, and is no less binding upon them than up- 
 on man. 
 
 He who thus believes will be filled with awe 
 and admiration of the divine nature ; he will de- "^E^ff. "^^ 
 sire to be beloved of God even as he loves God, 
 and will endeavour to make himself worthy of 
 God's love by imitation of God's holiness. Good 
 and evil there must be in the sum of things, but 
 evil is not with the gods; it dwells in this world 
 of ours, in the walks of mortal creatures, and the 
 life of the religious man will be a flight from evil 
 and an assimilation of the human to the divine 
 nature, in so far as this is possible, by rendering 
 himself just and righteous, even as God is free 
 from all injustice and unrighteousness. 
 
 Theaetetus 
 176a 
 
282 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 This is the doctrine of homoiosis theoi, "the be- 
 coming Hke to God," which permeates the whole 
 of Plato's religion, and which is equally funda- 
 mental to Christianity. It is the thought that, 
 perhaps more than any other, links the religious 
 experience of Greece into one unbroken tradition. 
 
 Justice and righteousness and holiness may 
 seem to be rather vague terms as they come to us 
 from theology, but they acquire a more practical 
 value when coloured by the mythological notion 
 of measure. Now it is scarcely too much to say 
 that the ethics of Platonism can be summed up 
 in the phrase, To he strong unto measuredness, 
 or as Jowett translates it more elegantly. Hold 
 out and observe moderation.^ And in this law 
 two things are imphed, or enjoined. First there 
 is the needed strength, involving resolution of 
 purpose and continuity of attention, the main- 
 taining of the soul in its citadel against all the 
 assaults of excess and the enticements of defect. 
 That is a state not altering as it alteration finds, 
 but fixed and certain, the constant opposite of 
 rhathyinia. In this sense justice, as an inhibition 
 of the ever-encroaching disproportion of desires, 
 and temperance, as an inner balance, are the ab- 
 solute virtues of God and the divine virtues in 
 
 1 Laws 918d: ^apreptlv iTpo<i ro fxirpiov. 
 
 i Republic 359c: Aia ttjv TrXtove^iav, o iraaa <f>vai<i SidiKCiv 
 
WORSHIP 283 
 
 But besides this strength of purpose the law 
 imphes the need of a wisdom which comes not by 
 wilhng alone but by practice. In a general way it 
 can be said that the effect of measure displays 
 itself in a balance of two opposite tendencies, one 
 of which, if left to itself, passes from courage to 
 recklessness and insolence, the other from tem- 
 perance to effeminacy and abjection. Out of 
 these two strands, the quick, obstinate, master- 
 ful, and the slow, yielding, servile, as from the 
 warp and woof on a weaver's loom, is wrought 
 the royal web of character; out of such elements 
 in the temper of the people is constructed that 
 balanced government which is neither tyranny 
 nor licentious democracy, but true aristocracy.^ 
 
 7r£</)VK£ (US ayaOov, v6/xm Se j8ta Trof aycrai iirl ttjv tov laov 
 Tifiriv. The words are those of Thrasymachus, but they are true 
 in a way which he did not intend. 
 
 3 The locus classicus for this balance of the irpq.ov and the 
 BvfioeiBe^ is the climax of the Politicus (306a ff). Other passages 
 showing the wide application of the principle are Theaetetus 
 144a; Republic 375c, 410d, 503c; Laws 731b, 773b. In the Nico- 
 machean Ethics Plato's pupil developed the conception into a 
 complete code of the golden mean, and in this form it has come 
 down to the modern world; but it is essentially and originally 
 Platonic, if one should not say Greek, It is important to add 
 that Aristotle, by separating God so absolutely from the world, 
 left a chasm between the contemplative life and the law of 
 measure which has had mischievous consequences for religion. 
 Plato's conception of God as the personal cause of measure is a 
 safer guide for both contemplation and conduct, and for the full 
 religious life which is the harmonious union of the two. 
 
284 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 Beyond this it is difficult to formulate the law. 
 There is no ready rule that tells a man in each 
 of his acts what is the right measure and what 
 is excess or defect; and it is a remarkable trait 
 of the Dialogues that, with all their discussion 
 of morality and of the various virtues, they con- 
 tain nothing corresponding to a Jesuitical casuis- 
 try or even approaching the precepts of Aris- 
 totle's NicomacJiean Ethics. This omission may 
 be due in part to the fact that Plato was sur- 
 veying a new field and left the details to be filled 
 in by later hands. But in part also, I think, his 
 reticence must be attributed to his perception of 
 the lack of finality in any such prescriptions. 
 poiiticus 294a "It is not for the law," he declares, "comprehend- 
 ing what is best and most just for all men at 
 once, to lay down exact rules as to what is the 
 highest good for them. The dissimilarities of 
 men and their conduct, and the fact that nothing 
 of humanity ever, so to speak, abides in quiet, 
 preclude the possibility of any simple code which 
 shall be universal and permanent." Plato would 
 say that in the tangled events of life we have no 
 lawgiver, human or divine, to tell us once for 
 all what we should do and from what we should 
 refrain, but that our only guide is the wisdom of 
 experience. Knowledge comes slowly by obser- 
 vation and tradition, and even so is never final. 
 This is the paradox of morality, from which 
 
conclusion 
 
 WORSHIP 285 
 
 Republic 
 
 there is no escaping. If we look upon the actual Bk. v, 
 events of life, justice and all fair things seem 
 never to be in one stay; and this is so true that 
 most men, whose eyes are made dizzy by gazing 
 too persistently upon the revolving wheels of 
 change, see nothing at last but custom and arti- 
 fice: that is just, they declare, which today is so 
 esteemed, and that is fair which today gives 
 pleasure, and today's opinion is as well based as 
 yesterday's or tomorrow's. Yet there is a Neme- 
 sis that follows such a conclusion — the ancient 
 law announced by the poets that men shall learn 
 by suffering, and proclaimed by science that ex- 
 perience is a sure teacher. In so far as our work- 
 ing codes of justice are falsely formulated they 
 result in confusion and thwarted growth; in so 
 far as they correspond to the unseen forces con- 
 trolling our nature they result in prosperity and 
 sound development. So it is that through the 
 kaleidoscopic ventures of life we learn a little of 
 the truth and catch glimpses of a "power not 
 ourselves that makes for righteousness." And 
 here is the point of contact with mythology. "In 
 a word, what course of action is dear and con- 
 sonant to God? One course there is, having war- 
 rant in one ancient report, that like will be 
 dear to like, being measured, whereas things 
 unmeasured will be dear neither to one another 
 nor to the measured. Now God in a special sense 
 
286 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 would be for us the measure of all things, and in 
 a way that no man, as they say, can be. He 
 therefore who will be dear to such a one must 
 himself become such another; and it follows that 
 he of us who is temperate is dear to God, being 
 like, and the intemperate is unlike and hostile, 
 as is the unjust, and so on with the other virtues 
 and vices." 
 
 God the measure of all things. That is to say, 
 for us God is the measure of conduct, as in the 
 creation and conduct of the world he is the source 
 and power of measure. So the passage should 
 be read in connection with the cosmological specu- 
 lation of the Philehus, wherein God is repre- 
 sented as the cause which imposes measure and 
 limit upon the naturally unlimited. So also it 
 falls in with the myth of the Timaeus, wherein 
 creation is dramatized as the work of God who, 
 in his goodness and freedom from envy, conde- 
 scends to the original chaos and fashions it by 
 measured and numbered form into a cosmos of 
 law and order and beauty. Philosophy in this 
 way, without relaxing the rigidity of its author- 
 ity, blends with mythology, and rehgion acquires 
 its large scope and magnificent courage. Our 
 search for happiness in justice and temperance 
 is no longer an isolated act subject to the charge 
 of insignificance, but becomes part of the divine 
 drama of the world; for by introducing measure 
 
WORSHIP 287 
 
 into our own unruly members we are imitating 
 God and helping in that endless labour of force 
 and persuasion by which chaos is kept in bounds. 
 "Plato, like Pythagoras," says one of the com- 
 mentators, "made imitation of God the end of 
 philosophy, but he gave clarity to the definition 
 by adding *so far as possible.' The possibihty 
 lies only in wisdom, and this is what accords with 
 virtue; for in God there is that which fashions 
 and governs the world, whereas in the wise man 
 there is an appointing of life and an order of 
 living."* 
 
 And man is not left without guidance and 
 comfort in the task of bringing measure into his 
 life. The world, as Plato believed, was full of 
 signs and voices indicating the presence of the 
 gods, and in the act of worship man was able to 
 draw very close to the divine society. Imme- 
 diately after the rule of imitation by measure 
 there follows this sentence: "Wherefore let us 
 hold to this report (logos) as agreeing with what 
 has been said, the fairest and truest, I think, of all 
 reports, that to make sacrifice and always to have 
 intercourse with the gods by prayer and offering 
 
 4 Arius Didymus (?) ap. Stobaeus, Eth. vi, 3: Sw/cpar?;? 
 nXaTwv TttvTo Tw Tlvdayopa, tc'Xos ofioiwciv deov. cra<^£<rTCpov S" 
 avTo 8i'qp6p(t>(T€ nXaTwv irpoaOfXi to Kara to SuvaTov, <f>povT^<T€t S* 
 ^v /Aovws Swarov, tovto 8' ^v to Kar' apiTTjV iv /xJv yap diiiS to 
 KO(r/<io7roiov Koi KOcr/xoSioiKT^TtKov, iv Sc T(p <ro<f><S /Si'ov Karao'TacTK 
 Kol ^oirjs Stoywyi/. 
 
288 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 and all divine service is for the good man the 
 fairest and best and most effective instrument of 
 the happy life." Such is the general principle 
 of worship, into the details of which, as set forth 
 in the sections of the Laws I have translated and 
 in other scattered passages, we need not enter. 
 But it is important to note that worship for 
 Plato had two distinct aspects, the pubhc and the 
 private. 
 
 In its outer manifestation, in the act of sacri- 
 fice with the attendant ceremonies of procession 
 and dance and song and prayer, Plato thought 
 of worship as primarily a common possession of 
 the people and as a bond of social union in the 
 spirit. Always when the forms of worship are 
 in question he refers to the Oracle of Delphi as 
 the traditional centre of authority. Even the 
 veneration of idols could be brought into his 
 scheme, though in admitting them he makes a 
 plea for a finer reverence of living symbols. 
 "Some of the gods [the Sun, etc.] we can see 
 with our eyes and so honour," he says; "but of 
 others we set up statues made in their likeness 
 and adore these soulless images, believing that 
 the living gods are pleased and grateful for our 
 homage. Yet, if a man has in his house such 
 treasures as a father or a mother or one of an 
 earlier generation stricken in years, let him never 
 Laws 931a supposc that any graven statue will have more 
 
WORSHIP 289 
 
 authority for him than this image he possesses 
 at the hearth of his home, if he serve it duly and 
 well."° So much Plato would grant to the family 
 as a smaller community within the larger com- 
 munity of the city. But generally he is explicit, 
 almost fanatic one might say, in his repudiation 
 of anything leaning towards the setting up of 
 independent rites. In a beautiful passage of the 
 Laws, where directions are given for consecrating 738c ff. 
 shrines to the gods and daemons of the various 
 tribes of the people, the chief object of worship 
 is described as the gathering together of young 
 and old at stated periods to the end that by the 
 association in sacrifice they may become known 
 to one another ("than which no greater good can 
 befall a city"), and light rather than darkness 
 may reign in the daily intercourse of life. Dis- 
 sent, with its bias towards eccentricity and its 
 tendency to dissipate reverence in rationalism, 
 would have been, and indeed was, abhorrent to 
 Plato in all its forms. "For you see," said Socra- 
 tes to a young man who was dejected because he 
 knew not how to worship the gods acceptably in 
 return for their beneficence to men, — "you see 
 that the god of Delphi, when some one asked him 
 
 5 For a defenct of idols, which might be appropriated by any 
 sacramentalist, see Maximus Tyrius ii, especially 2 f: AoKovaiv 
 817 /AOt KoX ol vofJLodiTaif Kado-TTip Tivi TTotSwv dycAj;, i^fvpetv tois 
 avdpwiroii TttVTi ra iydXfJuara, a-qfitia tjJs tt/jos to dtiov rifirj^, koi 
 tMTirtp \upay(iiyCav Ttva xai 68ov tt/bos avdfivrjaiy. 
 
290 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 such a question, replied, 'By the law and custom 
 of the city,' "^ That was the spirit of religion 
 which Plato learnt from his master, and to which 
 he held through all the years of his life. 
 
 And with this law and custom of the city, 
 which should determine for the individual the 
 ceremonial rites, went another law, that of tradi- 
 tion, which interpreted for him the reason and 
 inner meaning of worship. Tradition, report, 
 the ancient saying, are for Plato the intimation of 
 divine things which was given to men in old days, 
 almost by revelation one might say, when life was 
 larger and simpler and religious truth was less in- 
 volved in the complications of worldly knowledge, 
 and when the heroic children of the gods heard 
 what they took to be the immediate voice of their 
 fathers. This intimation of divine sonship was 
 the deposit, kept alive in the obscure conscious- 
 ness of the people, handed down and developed 
 by a succession of great teachers such as Pythag- 
 oras and the earlier theologians of the Bacchic 
 and Orphic societies, and proclaimed to the ini- 
 tiated in the mysteries. It is not very different 
 from the Christian theory of tradition, though 
 less precise and dogmatic.^ 
 
 ® No/Aw TToAcws, Xenophon, Mem. IV, iii, 16. — For the political 
 function of worship, see Aristotle, Nic. Eth., VIII, ix, 5. 
 
 '' Plato's general term for tradition in this sense is TraAatos 
 Aoyos or iraXaiol Aoyoi (e. g. Phaedo 70c; Laws 715e, 738c; and 
 
WORSHIP 291 
 
 But if Plato was a strong upholder of what 
 today would be called conformity, believing that 
 a certain hiunble docility of mind was the safest 
 attitude in these matters which are revealed to 
 us only in hints and symbols and adumbrations, 
 it would be a gross mistake to infer therefrom 
 that religion for him in any way approached the 
 communistic sense of human fellowship as defined 
 by Durkheim and other writers of the humani- 
 tarian school. Religion, as he thought of it, was 
 still the knowledge of a very real God, present 
 to the purified human soul, a knowledge confirmed 
 and deepened but in no wise created by the com- 
 mon consciousness. And however vigorously 
 Plato may have announced the claims of tradition 
 and the consensus of mankind in questions of 
 faith, however ready he may have shown himself 
 to worship at the altars of his own people in ac- 
 cordance with the law and custom of the city 
 where he was born, there was a point at which 
 
 compare Timaeus iOo, Philebus 16c). As an original "deposit," it 
 corresponds to the Ctiristian irapoKaTadrjKrj. As handed down 
 from generation to generation, it is the Christian TrapaSoo-is 
 whether written or oral; thus Basil, De Spiritu Sancto %66: 
 T&v iv Trj '¥jKK\r]<Tca ir€<f>v\ayfj.(V(i)v Soy/xoTwv kol K-qpvyfxaTniv to 
 pXv «K rrjX iyypd<f)ov St&Kr/caXi'as f;i(o/x«v,Ta Sc e/c t^s twv aTrooToXajv 
 7rapa8o(re<DS BiaSodfvra tjpXv iv p.v(TTrjpCw irapthi^ap-ida' airtp Ap.- 
 ^oTtpa T^v avTTjv l<T\vv (X€i w/Bos T^v tvaefitiav. The succession 
 of teachers is the 8ia8o)(r], for which, with references to the 
 corresponding SiaSoxr] twv t^tAoao^wv, see Essays on Early His- 
 tory of the Church, edited by H. B. Swete, pp. 197 ff, 201, 242. 
 
292 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 conformity ceased and the voice of conscience 
 made itself heard. So he accepted the traditional 
 gods, as manifestations more or less symbolical 
 of the obscure daemonic powers working through 
 the phenomenal world; but the immoral and un- 
 worthy stories attached to these sacred names 
 he rejected indignantly. So, too, the foundations 
 of religion go down to the instinctive belief of 
 mankind in the gods and their providential care, 
 striking through the superficial doubts which 
 trouble the mind which has begun to think for 
 itself. Yet here again the last resort is to the 
 individual consciousness; and as Socrates said to 
 Gorgias472B Polus, SO Plato would Say to his reader: What 
 have we to do with the discordant voices of the 
 world? I alone speak to you alone, and unless 
 the sohtary witness within you confesses to my 
 words, I speak to no purpose. This claim Socra- 
 tes and Plato make confidently, because they 
 474b know that there is that in all men which answers 
 to the truth despite the contradictions of the 
 forum and the schools. 
 
 In the formality of worship this line between 
 what belongs to the community and what belongs 
 to the individual would divide sacrifice from 
 prayer. Not absolutely indeed, for prayer was a 
 part of the ceremony at the altar and so of the 
 public function ; but it was more particularly the 
 privilege of the individual soul, and no one can 
 
WORSHIP 293 
 
 go through the Dialogues without being im- 
 pressed by the constant references to this act of 
 private devotion. Twice Plato gives what he evi- 
 dently regarded! as the normal form of such 
 prayer, once in Second Alcibiades when he quotes 
 the public supplication of Lacedaemon as a model 
 for the individual, "that the gods would grant 
 good things and still what is fair,"^ and a second 
 time at the close of the Phaedrus, when he en- 
 larges this ejaculation into the personal prayer 
 of Socrates: 
 
 "Beloved Pan and ye other gods that are here, 
 give me beauty in the inward soul, and may the 
 outward and the inward man be at one. May I 
 hold him rich that is wise, and grant me such a 
 quantity of gold as none but the temperate can 
 carry." 
 
 Something yet was needed before the human 
 soul could express itself as it was taught to do 
 in the Gospel, and Pan and the other gods could 
 never be the same to mankind as "Our Father." 
 But the meaning of prayer as Plato set it forth in 
 the Second Alcibiades, that it should be a humble 
 plea for enlightenment in what we need rather 
 than the demand of any particular desire, is sin- 
 gularly close to the best spirit of Christianity ; and 
 the phrase of the Laws, "always to have inter- 
 course with the gods by prayer," became the es- 
 
 8 148c: Ta KaXa iirl Tois dya^ots tovs Oeoiis Biiovat. 
 
294 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 tablished formula of the finer Platonists and of 
 the Fathers. For the former we have the witness 
 of Maximus of Tyre: "You indeed think that 
 the prayer of the philosopher is to ask for things 
 not present, but I say that it is intercourse and 
 conversation with the gods concerning things 
 present and a manifestation of the soul's virtue." 
 And Clement of Alexandria was Platonist as 
 well as Christian when he declared that "prayer 
 is intercourse with God."^ 
 
 Religion is thus both public and private, and 
 it must ever remain the delicate task of the wor- 
 shipper to be diffident of his personal beliefs and 
 at the same time to judge for himself between the 
 settled deeper conviction and the floating opin- 
 ions of mankind. Perhaps there is an unresolved 
 paradox in this appeal at once to the individual 
 conscience and to common consent; if so it is a 
 difficulty not peculiar to Plato but one that has 
 persisted to the present day. I should say that 
 the fairest example of it in modern times, muta- 
 tis mutandis^ is the endeavour of the Anglican 
 
 Laws 716 d: npoo-o/niXciv ail T015 dcoii €vxaU. — Maximus v, 
 8b: 2v» fi€v i^yet t^v tov <^tXocrd<^ov tv\rjv oLTrjcriv eivai Tuiv ov 
 TrapovTOiv, iyw Se o/u.i\iav koI SiaXtKTOV irpoi T»v? ^€oi>s Trtpl Twv 
 TrapdvTwv Kai eirtSet^iv T^S «1/J«T^S. — Clement, Strom. VII, vii, 39 fF: 
 *E(rTtv ovv, ws elirtlv roXfirjpoTcpov, ofiiXia irpot tov 6i6v ^ ^^\rj 
 . . . dXA.* ovv y€ 6 yvwo'TiKos vapa oXov €v\eTai tov /Slov, hi tv^rji 
 (Tvvclvat filv a-irevSiDV diw k.t.X. — See also Dio Chrysostom ix, 17; 
 Origen, De Or. §25 ; St. Chrysostom, In Rom. 585d S. 
 
WORSHIP 295 
 
 profession to hold a middle course between the 
 Romanists, who accept absolutely the authority 
 of the Church, and the Bible Protestants, who, 
 practically, reject such authority for a document 
 which each man must interpret for himself. And 
 I should venture to assert that, not indeed in all 
 dogmas, but in what may be called the ethos of 
 religion, no book of theology comes closer to the 
 spirit of Platonism than Hooker's Ecclesiastical 
 Polity, It may be irksome to the imperious de- 
 mands of the reason to rest in this undetermined 
 ground of compromise and adjustment; but so 
 it is, in this as in all things else, religion is a part 
 of the sense of the divine as a law of measure and 
 mediation. 
 
 Possibly the reader, while acknowledging the 
 nobility of Plato's imitation of God, will yet miss 
 the one thing that seems to him the very essence 
 of the Christian hfe: "Pure religion and unde- 
 filed before God and the Father is this, To visit 
 the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and 
 to keep himself unspotted from the world."^" 
 Now purity from the defilement of the world 
 was the aim of the Platonist quite as much as of 
 the Christian, but in the other clause of the pre- 
 cept there is a tenderness, a beauty of devotion, 
 which cannot be found in Platonism. There is 
 nowhere in the Dialogues or in the writings of 
 
 i» James i, 27. — See ante, chap, i, note 1. 
 
296 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 any commentator anything corresponding to the 
 conception of imitation which a Christian moral- 
 ist could draw from the Gospel : " 'Love your 
 enemies,' it is said, 'bless them that curse you, 
 and pray for them which despitefully use you,' 
 and the like ; to which it is added, 'that ye may be 
 the children of your Father which is in heaven,' 
 in words that imply the becoming like to God."" 
 So much, it must be admitted, Christianity 
 brought into human life which Plato had not dis- 
 covered. And the admission is large. But with- 
 al it must not be magnified out of proportion. 
 Though paganism at its best fell short of what 
 may be called the sanctity of love, it was not re- 
 stricted, as some would have us beheve, to a harsh 
 and narrow egotism ; far from that. Everywhere 
 in The Republic and the Laws, to go no further 
 afield, the good of the individual is made sub- 
 ordinate to the welfare of the State, and the State 
 itself is regarded as a kind of fellowship of 
 friends, and friendship is glorified as it has rarely 
 been in later times. And if Plato did not feel 
 quite the broadest philanthropic sympathy, at 
 least he was open to the appeal of kinship among 
 all Greeks, and the Stoics took but a step further 
 in the same direction when they taught that all 
 men as the children of God were brothers and 
 
 11 Clement, Stromata IV, xiv, 95. 
 
WORSHIP »97 
 
 citizens of one city, the world." Nor in his per- 
 sonal ethics did Plato at all overlook the ordinary 
 obligations or the tender sentiment of family and 
 social hf e. Even the idea of service was not want- 
 ing to his outlook. In the allegory of the cave, 
 when the prisoner of darkness has thrown off his 
 shackles, and has passed upwards to the light and 
 the vision of things as they are and to the joyous 
 air of liberty, he is not left there in the peaceful 
 solitude of emancipation, but is commanded to go 
 down again into the shadows and to force into 
 dull ears the message of hope. Always the phi- 
 losopher, so long as he can make his voice heard 
 amidst the hubbub of earthly noises, is a preacher 
 among men, a fighter for truth and righteous- 
 ness, and a bearer of the burden of human error. 
 At times this note in Plato, particularly in that 
 allegory of the cave, sounds curiously like the 
 "condescension" and the "emptying of himself" 
 (the synkatabasis and henosis of the theologians) 
 by which the Son of Man made himself like to 
 men that he might raise men to the likeness of 
 God. 
 
 Nevertheless Plato's first interest is in morality 
 as something intimate and private to the man 
 
 12 E.g. Epictetus, Discourses I, ix, 1 : Et ravTo. lariv aXrjdrj to. 
 TTcpi Ti}s (Tvyyevtia^ tov Otov kol av6pwTr<i>v Xeyofxtva vno twv <^iX- 
 oaoffxjiv, Tt aWo aTroActVcTat Tott av6puiiroi<; 17 to tov SwKpaTors, 
 u.-nheiroTC Trpos tov irv^d/xtvov TroSaTrds iariv eiTreiv oTi AaT^voios t] 
 Kopivdio;, aW oti Koa/xios. 
 
298 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 himself. Even the solidarity of the State is 
 taught not so much with a view to the welfare of 
 society as with a view to illustrating the unity in 
 subordination of the individual soul ; and the mis- 
 adventures of his political theory spring from his 
 occasional forgetfulness that the just organiza- 
 tion of the State can be used as a "writing in 
 large" of justice in the soul only with such re- 
 servations as go with the fact that the unity of 
 interest in society as a collection of individual 
 souls belongs to an entirely different order from 
 the unity of the soul as a complex of "faculties." 
 Always his ethical method, when free of such 
 entanglements, is to maintain that inner balance 
 and government of character are to be striven for 
 first, and that virtuous conduct will follow from 
 this inner adjustment automatically. So true is 
 this, that if, under untoward circumstances, in- 
 ner harmony and public duty should become so 
 estranged as to render the pursuit of both at 
 once incompatible, he would advise the tormented 
 soul to seek purity and peace in retirement from 
 the world — an apparent sacrifice of duty only, 
 since such withdrawal may yet be the highest 
 service. Plato's ethics of measure and justice is 
 certainly individualistic; the question is how far 
 in this his philosophy differs from Christianity. 
 Now undoubtedly justice and love, taken re- 
 spectively as the initiative forces of morality, do 
 
WORSHIP 299 
 
 lead to profound divergencies in character. Un- 
 doubtedly it makes a great difference in religion 
 if the God whom we are to imitate is regarded as 
 the imposer of measure on the aboriginal chaos, 
 though He be actuated by goodness and lack of 
 emy, or as one who "so loved the world that He 
 gave His only begotten Son." But it does not 
 appear that, rehgiously considered, one of these 
 principles is more intimate, more individualistic, 
 so to speak, than the other. As motives they 
 agree in this, that both have their original im- 
 pulse within; both look primarily to the attain- 
 ment of an inner condition, and only secondarily 
 to the relations of man with man. For the Chris- 
 tian the love of God is the first law, upon which 
 the love of man is to follow; and the sacrifice of 
 God's Son was made in order that the individual 
 believing soul "might not perish but have everlast- 
 ing life." The private harmony of the man him- 
 self with his divine source and end is the primary 
 requisite of salvation, and from this spiritual 
 atonement the unison and concord of society will 
 follow as a natural consequence. 
 
 The serious rift is not between Christianity 
 and Platonism, but between the common Greek 
 sense of religion as it developed unchanged at 
 the core through all the changes of the eight hun- 
 dred years from the death of Socrates to the 
 death of St. Chrysostom, and as it persisted, 
 
300 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 though with graver alterations, in the western 
 world until a comparatively recent date — the 
 great chasm is between that religious spirit and 
 the prevailing modern ethics. The difference is 
 in the attitude towards the distinctive reality and 
 importance of the soul. "For what shall it profit 
 a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and 
 lose his own soul?'"^ That is the Christian note 
 that sounds through all the Fathers of the Greek 
 period. Clement was faithful to this precept 
 when he said that "worship of God for the Gnos- 
 tic (the perfect Christian) is the continual study 
 of his soul and the occupation with his diviner 
 part with unceasing love," and that "the Gnostic 
 is pious in that he cares first for himself, and then 
 for his neighbours, in order that we may be made 
 virtuous to the uttermost.'"* Basil had the same 
 
 13 1 am aware of the different interpretations put upon this 
 text by certain modern exegetes who translate \}rvxr) by "life" 
 rather than "soul." Pfleiderer, for instance (Primitive Chris- 
 tianity II, 44'4), takes the text simply as an exhortation against 
 cowardice or disloyalty at the critical moment when Christ was 
 about to establish his Messianic kingdom. It may be (though I 
 doubt it) that the words as spoken by Jesus had some such 
 meaning as this; but certainly they were not so understood by 
 the Patristic writers, and by Christianity I mean always the 
 developed faith of Clement and Athanasius, the Cappadocians, 
 and Chrysostom rather than any conjectural interpretation of the 
 Gospel narrative. 
 
 liStrotnata VII, i, 3; iii, 16. Compare also VII, iii, 13 et 
 passim. This notion of the higher service almost excludes the 
 notion of conscious service. The man who sets out to raise himself 
 
WORSHIP 301 
 
 text in mind, when he wrote: "Wherefore all 
 our guard should be upon keeping the soul. 
 Herein let us slacken not, nor for a little ease 
 barter our great hopes. What then should we 
 do? What else but have the soul in our care, for 
 this maintaining leisure from all other things ?"^^ 
 In the Middle Ages the author of the Imitation 
 took the old maxim of Seneca's so rigorously as 
 to render religion almost inhuman: Quoties in- 
 ter homines fui, minor homo redii. Plato would 
 never have carried the principle of imitation to 
 this extreme of asceticism. But for him the sal- 
 vation of a man's own soul was the basis of phi- 
 losophy and religion as truly as it was to a St. 
 Paul or a Clement or a Basil. To enumerate the 
 passages in which he anticipates the doctrine 
 would be little less than to give a summary of 
 all his Dialogues.^** 
 
 deliberately as an example for others, is likely to end as a mere 
 prig. The man who sets out to elevate his neighbours without 
 elevating himself may become a mere reformer. 
 
 ^^ Sermo de Legendis Libris Oentilium §§2, 6: Ato 8^ Trdarf 
 <j)vXaKrj rrjv y{^XV^ TrjprjTiov . . . . ov Brj ovv pa6vfj.r]Tiov -^fJUVj 
 ovSc T^s €V Ppa)(ei pqarwyrji fj.tya\a<i eXiriSa^ avTa\\aKT€ov .... 
 Tt ovv TTOtui/xev; <f>aCr] Tts ay. Ti aWo ye ^ T^s i'vxV'* ^TTifieKetav 
 £;;^£iv, Tratrav <r)(oXr]v airo twv oAXwv ayovTav; See also Letter ccxlv: 
 Mt/Scv TrpoTifxoTepov t^s aXijdciai kol Trj<: oikcuis eavrwv d(T<f)a\€Las 
 ridipuvoL. 
 
 16 Ackermann, in Das Chriatliche im Plato und in der plato- 
 nischen Philosophie, makes much of the doctrine of salvation as 
 the bond between Platonism and Christianity. 
 
302 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 Thus the theory of imitation is only an exten- 
 sion of Plato's "philosophy of the soul." From 
 one point of view the office of religion is to draw 
 the soul up into likeness of God, from another 
 point of view it is to draw the soul away from 
 the world ; and there may, or may not, be an ele- 
 ment of incompatibility in these two processes, 
 according as we understand them. In the al- 
 legory of the cave the path upwards to the divine 
 light of realities is also a way of escape from the 
 bondage of ignorance, and in general the Platonic 
 philosophy might be defined as a turning of the 
 soul away from this shadowy life and an ascent, 
 or reascent, to a region of truth far above this 
 Republic sooBclouded atmosphere; nor is there any leisure for 
 one who has been so lifted up to look down upon 
 the business of this world and to fill his mind 
 with the contentions and jealousies of mankind. 
 In the same spirit philosophy is regarded as a 
 study of death, by which Plato means a weaning 
 of the soul from the pleasures and pains of mor- 
 tal life and a preparation for a time when it shall 
 be set free from the prison-house of the body. 
 176a And, again, in the passage of the Theaetetus 
 which announces most clearly the doctrine of imi- 
 tation, the becoming like to God is said to be a 
 flight; for of necessity evils dwell in this our 
 mortal nature and in this region of the earth, and 
 
WORSHIP 303 
 
 our endeavour must be to flee hence to the sphere 
 of the gods with all possible speed. 
 
 Now in the simple faith of the Orphic sects 
 from whom Plato received the doctrine of imita- 
 tion and flight, there is no incompatibility and 
 nothing to reconcile. God, they thought, was 
 good and the flesh was evil — body is equivalent 
 to tomb (soma-sema) ; the soul of man belongs 
 with God, is of God, and only by some unac- 
 countable lapse has become immersed in matter, 
 from which by ascetic rites and the intoxication 
 of ecstasy it may be released and once more re- 
 absorbed into its divine source. No causal nexus 
 exists between God and the cosmos, no excuse for 
 the habitation of the spirit in the flesh, but a 
 yawning abyss between two worlds. With such 
 a belief, whether held by the ascetic sects of pagan 
 Greece or by the later ascetics of Christianity," 
 there is no inconsistency between imitation and 
 flight, which are merely the positive and negative 
 aspects of one and the same motion of the soul. 
 
 But in Plato's religion the matter is not so 
 simple. However at times he may seem to speak 
 the unmitigated language of Orphism, his sober 
 theory was of a different hue. If the God of 
 the Timaeus is the model of imitation, the God 
 
 17 Absolute asceticism was never the orthodox Christian view 
 and indeed could not be held consistently with their theory of 
 creation, but it obtained nevertheless largely in practice. 
 
304 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 who in his goodness and beneficence brings or- 
 der and form into the world of phenomena, then 
 imitation cannot be by way of turning the back 
 absolutely on mortal existence, nor can spiritual 
 growth be coincident with escape from respon- 
 sibilities : we too have our task and duty here and 
 now. Yet in this same dialogue metempsycho- 
 sis is presented in such a manner that birth in 
 the body would seem to be the consequence of 
 some fault in the soul, and the upward path ends 
 in an eternal release from the entanglements 
 and even the obligations of earthly life. It is not 
 easy in such a conception of religion to reconcile 
 the acts of imitation and of flight, and I doubt 
 whether they ever have been, or can be perfectly 
 reconciled, whether we must not be content to 
 accept them frankly as they are, each in itself, and 
 in practice strike what balance we can. After 
 all this is only another aspect of the difficulty in- 
 herent in the view of religion as at once public 
 and private, communal and individualistic. 
 
 The paradox of such a situation has often been 
 stated by religious writers, perhaps nowhere 
 much better, or at least more quaintly, than in 
 the words of Synesius, the Platonizing Bishop 
 of Ptolemais: 
 
 "God has made pleasure to be a kind of clasp 
 for the soul, by means of which it endures the 
 assiduity of the body. . . . Another may say 
 
WORSHIP 305 
 
 what drink of oblivion there is for the souls that 
 have departed, but I know that to the soul that 
 has entered life the pleasure and sweetness of this 
 world are held forth as a drink of oblivion. For, 
 descending to its first life as a voluntary wage- 
 earner, it forgets its freedom and becomes a slave. 
 Its duty was to offer a certain free service to the 
 nature of the world, under the decrees of Neces- 
 sity; but, beguiled by material gifts, it suffers 
 such a lot as befalls those free men who hire them- 
 selves out for a definite time, and then, ensnared 
 by the beauty of a maidservant, are willing to 
 remain, admitting their slavery to the master of 
 their beloved. . . . But those who believe in 
 Providence and take heed to themselves, will be 
 at once pious and observant of duty ; nor will they 
 think there is any discord between keeping the 
 mind fixed on God and practising virtue."^^ 
 
 In Plato, as in Synesius, pleasure is the nail, 
 or clasp, that fastens the soul to the body, re- 
 garded at one time as an association of evil to be 
 rent asunder, and at another time as a means of 
 discipline in virtue and a field of duty. In Plato 
 also men are here as servants of the world, whose 
 eyes nevertheless must be turned away from the 
 world to God. Nor, I think, do these apparently 
 conflicting views represent different stages in Pla- 
 to's growth (though no doubt some change of em- 
 
 isDto §6; De Insomn. §5; De Prov. I, §11. The last section, 
 from the De Providentia, should be read in full. 
 
306 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 phasis his view of life did undergo), so much as 
 a constant recognition of the fact that rehgion 
 cannot be simphfied into a monistic formula. It 
 would be a blessed relief from anxiety and hesi- 
 tation, if we might conform our conduct to a 
 simple metaphysical abstraction, as the pure as- 
 cetic or the pure humanitarian or even the honest 
 votary of pleasure professes to do; but that is a 
 forbidden blessing which the wise man, Christian 
 or Platonist, will forgo." 
 
 19 Baron Friedrich von Hiigel, The Mystical Element of Re- 
 ligion II, 127: "The fact is that here, as practically at every chief 
 turning-point in ethical and religious philosophy, the movement 
 of the specifically Christian life and conviction is not a circle 
 round a single centre, — detachment; but an ellipse round two 
 centres, — detachment and attachment. And precisely in this 
 difficult, but immensely fruitful, oscillation and rhythm between, 
 as it were, the two poles of the spiritual life; in this fleeing and 
 seeking, in the recollection back and away from the visible (so as 
 to allay the dust and fever of growing distraction, and to re- 
 harmonize the soul and its new gains according to the intrinsic 
 requirements and ideals of the spirit), and in the subsequent, 
 renewed immersion in the visible, (in view both of gaining fresh 
 concrete stimulation and content for the spiritual life, and of 
 gradually shaping and permeating the visible according to and 
 with spiritual ends and forces) : in this combination, and not in 
 either of these two movements taken alone, consists the com- 
 pleteness and culmination of Christianity." — This I take to be an 
 excellent statement of the Platonic, as well as the Christian, 
 experience of moral detachment and attachment: only with this 
 diflFerence, that in Christian mysticism there lurks always the temp- 
 tation to forget that the evil of our state is an intrinsic evil, out 
 of which we must wring what good we can, and not a necessary 
 factor of the good. 
 
WORSHIP 307 
 
 Above all, however the law of imitation be 
 understood, the true Platonist will not fall into 
 the sentiment conveyed by the Plotinian consum- 
 mation of philosophy in the "flight of the alone 
 to the alone."^" No doubt the primary meaning 
 of "alone" (monos) in Plotinus is still rather 
 "separation from the body and the world" than 
 "loneliness of spirit"; but already the more mod- 
 ern sense of "loneliness" was beginning to en- 
 croach on the classical usage, and Lionel Johnson 
 was doing no violence to the Neoplatonic tradi- 
 tion when he wrote the pathetic lines : 
 
 "Do what thou wilt, thou shalt not so, 
 Dark Angel! triumph over me: 
 Lonely, unto the lone I go; 
 Divine, to the Divinity." 
 
 Plotinus is the mediating link between Plato 
 and modern romanticism; but his mediation is by 
 way of a deep perversion. It may be that Plato 
 sometimes portrayed the religious life as one of 
 isolation; the sentimental luxury of solitude he, 
 as a true Greek, would certainly have scorned. 
 Nor was there anything of sullen or morose in 
 his conception of flight from the world. If the 
 Plotinian phrase is to be used at all, it should 
 be interpreted in the spirit of one of the Cam- 
 bridge divines who contrived to combine with it 
 a genuine Christian Platonism : 
 
 20Ennead VI, ix, 11. 
 
308 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 "By what hath been said may appear the vast 
 difference between the ways of Sin and Holi- 
 nesse. Inward distractions and disturbances, 
 tribulation and anguish upon every Soul that 
 doth evil: But to every man that worketh good, 
 glory, honour and peace, inward composednesse 
 and tranquiUity of spirit, pure and divine joys 
 farr excelling all sensual pleasures; in a word, 
 true Contentment of spirit and full satisfaction 
 in God, whom the pious Soul loves above all 
 things, and longs still after a nearer enjoyment of 
 him. I shall conclude this Particular with what 
 Plotinus concludes his Book, That the life of 
 holy and divine men is /Sto? av^Sovo^ rtav r^Be^ (f>vyt] 
 fiovovrrpb^ fi6vov,a, life not touch't with these van- 
 ishing delights of Time, but a flight of the 
 Soul alone to God alone."" 
 
 That is close to the right note of imitation and 
 flight; but it needs yet to be modified and sup- 
 plemented by what is the very essence of Platon- 
 ism, the doctrine of Ideas. 
 
 21 John Smith, True Religion, chap. vi. 
 
CHAPTER XII 
 
 RELIGIOUS LIFE: THE IDEAL WORLD 
 
 The philosopher, Plato says, is essentially a Republic 475e 
 philotheamon, one who desires to see the truth set 
 forth manifestly before him, as well as to know it. 
 Inevitably, by the weight of this desire, the laws 
 of justice and temperance and all the other reali- 
 ties of the moral life, as these in their purity are 
 known to him in the soul, dress themselves out vis- 
 ibly, symbolically at least, to what may be called 
 the inner eye; they become forms. Ideas, that 
 move before his gaze in independent loveliness, 
 as objects to be pursued and grasped and taken 
 to the heart. His ethical experience transforms 
 itself into a world of transcendent images, en- 
 dowed with power to draw all men to them by 
 their gracious influence. Why not? Shall a man 
 say to himself that the vision of justice and beauty 
 and the rest of the choir exists only by the fancy 
 of his own soul, that he is the creator of these 
 divine beings? That were a pride, an insolence 
 of egotism, that would throw dismay into the 
 whole range of morality. So figuratively, and 
 still something more than figuratively, Plato's 
 philosophy becomes Ideal, and carries the soul 
 
 309 
 
310 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 into a realm of its own, which is not of this world. 
 The vision of Ideas is like the sight of a foreign 
 land after a long sea-voyage, in a vessel tossed 
 by the waves and borne over the endless expanse 
 of waters. When the coast is first seen afar off, 
 through the mist, how mysterious it appears and 
 how the heart rejoices! And as we draw near, 
 and behold the green slopes and the houses here 
 and there, we can hardly beheve that these are 
 the abodes of men like ourselves, but think they 
 must belong to some other-worldly beings whose 
 days are filled with happiness and peace. 
 
 But there is something in Plato's divine realm 
 besides Ideas; God is there, and the gods, and 
 those who accept the Platonic philosophy without 
 acceding wholeheartedly also to his theology have 
 made themselves free of the outer court, but have 
 not entered into the inner sanctuary of rehgion. 
 Now in the myth of creation, as it is unfolded m 
 the Timaeus, God, being good and desiring all 
 things to be like him, lays hand upon the brute 
 substance of the flux and, so far as its nature will 
 submit to force and persuasion, brings it under 
 the dominion of law and order and number. He 
 is a Demiurge; and, as a painter or sculptor 
 works with a model before him, so his eye is fixed 
 upon the world of Ideas, and this our world of 
 phenomena is fashioned by him as a temporal 
 image of an eternal pattern. And in this cosmic 
 
THE IDEAL WORLD 311 
 
 drama man too plays a part. He has that within 
 him which corresponds to the duahsm of God and 
 Necessity; the soul possesses an authority and 
 freedom, as Maximus the Platonist of Tyre ex- 
 presses it,^ akin to the divine, and at the same 
 time it is troubled by passions which are similar 
 to the restless motions of unformed matter. By 
 reason of this double nature, he is under obliga- 
 tion, or at least has the power, to render him- 
 self like to God by bringing law and order into 
 the unruly members of his own being, as God 
 exercises government upon the lawless elements 
 of the material world. One may hesitate to say 
 whether in this act of self-ordering the soul looks 
 upon the Ideas of goodness and beauty and jus- 
 tice and all the rest and so becomes good and 
 beautiful and just, or by becoming good and 
 beautiful and just the soul strengthens its faculty 
 of vision so as to behold the spectacle of eternal 
 verities; the two processes, perhaps, are rather 
 concomitant and mutual than sequent as cause 
 and effect. But one may say more certainly that 
 at the end, after many lives and repeated lessons, 
 the soul may purge itself of its passions so as to 
 be raised, like God, into that celestial happiness 
 which consists in the unbroken contemplation of 
 the perfect and everlasting world of Ideas. 
 
 'i- Philosophoumena xiii, 8b: ToiavTiyv oput koi tw dvdpwirw t^v 
 Stayuiyrjv tov /3tov, ifiifii^iov kol MKpafievrjv ofxov i(ov<ria koi 
 avdyKjj K.T.A. 
 
312 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 It would be hard to overestimate the distinc- 
 tion given to the common conception of imitation 
 by Plato's peculiar doctrine of God and Ideas. 
 Platonism may soar into regions dim and remote, 
 but it never vanishes away in the abysmal Absolute 
 of metaphysics or the equally abysmal Person of 
 pantheism. The mythology of the Timaeus has 
 room for a world-soul as for the individual souls 
 of men, but these are kept forever apart from 
 the supreme Deity, while the orb of Ideas, spread 
 before the gaze of God and man alike, maintains 
 its manifold identity without dissolving into a 
 pale abstraction. And with the elimination of 
 metaphysics and pantheism the practice of re- 
 ligion is saved from one and the other form of 
 mysticism, whether it be the effort of a soul to 
 lose itself in some ultimate negation of the reason 
 or to forget its own personality in ecstatic union 
 with God. No doubt to some straining spirits 
 this limitation will appear a weakness rather than 
 a strength, a derogation at once from the majesty 
 of God and the dignity of man. Whether they 
 be right or wrong, this, at least, ought to be recog- 
 nized as the special note of Platonism, that it 
 can rise to a high level of spiritual contemplation 
 without abandoning the sense of distinctions. 
 And I for my part, weighing as well as I can 
 the records of the religious life in the Orient and 
 the Occident, am persuaded that pantheism and 
 
THE IDEAL WORLD 313 
 
 metaphysics are a perversion of spiritual truth 
 which can be explained by just that difficulty of 
 maintaining distinctions in the dizzy flight of the 
 soul upwards. I have come to believe, moreover, 
 that the way of mysticism, even when it denotes a 
 genuine effort of the spirit and however fine its 
 fruits may appear (for there is also a bastard 
 mysticism of the senses which masquerades as 
 spirituality), is a, way perillous to the soul's 
 health and misses still at the end the balance and 
 measure and steadfastness, the tranquil happiness 
 in a word, of a sounder religious experience. 
 
 The difference between these two types of 
 homoiosis strikes so deep into the whole religious 
 life that we may turn aside here to look briefly 
 into the history of the matter by way of antici- 
 pating what belongs properly to another volume 
 of our series. The philosophic basis for mysticism 
 was laid by Aristotle ; and it ought not to be with- 
 out significance that this step was taken by one 
 who, however great his services were otherwise to 
 scientific philosophy, had less of the religious 
 mind than his predecessor. Now Aristotle re- 
 pudiated Plato's scheme of Ideas as existences 
 separate from phenomena, and regarded them as 
 the forms in, or of, particular objects. With this 
 rejection of the Ideal world God was left alone, 
 in solitary majesty, one may say, to occupy the 
 whole sphere of the divine. And Aristotle did 
 
314 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 not stop here, but still further altered the con- 
 ception of God himself. To Plato the deity, 
 as the prototype of all soul, was the self-moving 
 power which, not moved from without, was the 
 source of all outer motion. Aristotle, not con- 
 tent with this halfway position, but yielding to the 
 urgent drive of abstract reason, proceeded to de- 
 fine God as the unmoved mover, the absolute 
 unity behind the moving diversity of the world. 
 As such, deity is beyond space and without feel- 
 ing or quality or substance; his activity, perfect 
 in itself, is confined to that theoria, as described 
 in the famous passage of the Ethics, which is not 
 vision of the Ideas, but pure thinking without 
 content of thought, a completely abstracted self- 
 contemplation. There remains no room for the 
 working of Providence or for divine fellowship and 
 help ; God can be associated with the world, not 
 by his voluntary participation in the work of 
 creation and government, but only in so far as he 
 stands aloof as the absolute end and goal of all 
 things, identical thus in a manner with Plato's 
 impersonal Idea of the Good, as that which "be- 
 ing desired so imparts motion, and moves all 
 other things by means of that which is moved."^ 
 So it is that the door of philosophy is thrown 
 open to mysticism. Enlightenment will be a 
 process of raising the soul into likeness to God ; 
 
 2Zeller, Oeschichte III, 362 flP. 
 
THE IDEAL WORLD 315 
 
 but this assimilation to the divine, as it reaches 
 its consummation in the so-called Neoplatonism 
 of Plotinus, will be sought in ecstatic absorption 
 into a superessential impersonal One. 
 
 The link between this metaphysical mysticism 
 and Christian mysticism can be found in the 
 kind of thought represented by Philo, who, pur- 
 posing to interpret the Old Testament in the 
 terms of Platonism, was led by his reverence for 
 the Jewish tradition to a conception of the deity 
 quite alien to Plato. His God might be defined 
 as an unstable compound of Aristotle's Absolute 
 and the intensely personal Jehovah of Moses. 
 The Ideal world of Plato, losing its eternal inde- 
 pendence, is reduced to a plan conceived within 
 the divine mind, or to a project thrown out by 
 the Creator as the pattern of a material world 
 to be fashioned in its likeness. The goal of re- 
 ligion will not be fellowship with the gods in con- 
 templation of the Ideal world, but a rapture and 
 ecstasy in which the soul forgets itself and all 
 else in its passionate approach to God alone.^ 
 
 In this direction was set the Platonism of the 
 early ages. Not entirely indeed; for a few phi- 
 losophers can be found among the pagans who 
 
 3 An excellent account of this will be found in Philo's Contri- 
 bution to Religion, by H. A. A. Kennedy, though I should not 
 give to the word "contribution" the meaning given to it by the 
 author. 
 
316 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 preserved the genuine tradition, and the Chris- 
 tians also, even those of a mystical tendency, 
 could satisfy themselves at times with a simpler 
 Platonic reading of Paul's great saying: "We 
 look not at the things which are seen, but at the 
 things which are not seen: for the things which 
 are seen are temporal; but the things which are 
 not seen are eternal."* But in general the philo- 
 sophic Christian was carried by his theology to 
 waver between a semi-Platonism, as it may be 
 called, like that of Philo, and a full-blown Neo- 
 platonic mysticism. So at one time Origen de- 
 scribes the passage of the soul beyond the mys- 
 teries of earth, and beyond the heavens, to the 
 vision of the Ideal world as it is in God. "For 
 there is in God a treasure of sight much greater 
 than the spectacle of earthly or heavenly things. 
 . . . For I am persuaded that beyond those things 
 which are seen by the sun and moon, and by the 
 choir of the stars, and of the holy angels whom 
 God hath made to be 'spirit and a flaming fire,' — 
 that beyond these God treasureth and keepeth in 
 Himself much greater things, which He shall 
 manifest when 'all the creatures shall be delivered 
 from the bondage of corruption into the glorious 
 Hberty of the children of God.' " Then at last 
 
 4 II Corinthians iv, 18. — Compare, e.g., Origen Exh. ad Mart. 
 §44, One of the finest uses of Platonism that I recall among 
 Christian writers is Eusebius' magnificent eulogy of the Church 
 in his sermon at Tyre: Toiovtos 6 /xc'yas k.t.X. 
 
THE IDEAL WORLD 317 
 
 we shall pass beyond the wisdom of signs and 
 figures and attain to the nature of Ideas and to 
 the beauty of truth itself.' In like manner 
 Clement of Alexandria, referring to Plato's doc- 
 trine of Ideas in the Phaedrus, had declared that 
 "the Idea is God's thought, which Barbarians [i.e. 
 Christians] call the Word of God." And so, he 
 argues, giving a new turn to the very language 
 of Plato, "if we say there is such a thing as jus- 
 tice itself, and beauty itself, and even truth itself, 
 we have never yet beheld one of these things with 
 the eyes but with the reason, and the Word of 
 God says, 'I am the truth.' "*" 
 
 From this semi-Platonism it is but a step to a 
 complete mysticism, wherein Ideas are forgotten 
 in the longing to look upon God Himself, and 
 to lose all discrimination in the blinding vision 
 of the divine personality. That was the ultimate 
 goal for Clement: "Wherefore the gnosis [mys- 
 tic intuition] doth easily translate the soul to the 
 divine and holy which is akin to it, and by its own 
 light conveys a man through the mystic stages, 
 until it restores him at last to the supernal place 
 of rest, teaching him who is pure in heart to gaze 
 upon God, face to face, with perfect science and 
 understanding. For in this consisteth the perfec- 
 tion of the gnostic soul, that, rising above all 
 
 B Exh. ad Mart. §13. 
 Stromata V, iii, 16. 
 
318 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 purification and service, it should be with God."^ 
 With Origen mysticism encroached still further 
 on semi-Platonism, and in the writings of the 
 pseudo-Dionysius it passed into an extravagance 
 beyond which human speech cannot go and retain 
 any vestige of meaning. 
 
 And this mysticism, which interpreted Plato's 
 theory of Ideas by St. Paul's "God shall be all 
 in all," was by no means confined to Alexandria, 
 where lay its natural home. In particular it per- 
 meated the theology of Augustine, and from him 
 spread over the western world. To the African 
 saint, who acknowledged but one desire, "to know 
 God and the soul, these and nothing more," it was 
 inevitable that Ideas should be inconceivable nisi 
 in ipsa mente creatoris. God to him was the only 
 substance, the cause of all being, the fountain of 
 all forms ; and for man the vision and contempla- 
 tion of truth meant a return to God — redire ad 
 Deum — and nothing more.* 
 
 But if the goal of the Christian mystic was thus 
 different from that of the Platonic Idealist, the 
 beginning of their paths and the ascent for part 
 of the way were much alike, as Clement has 
 pointed out in the opening chapter of the 
 Stromata and in many other places. For the 
 
 T Stromata VII, x, 57, 
 
 8 For Augustine's mystical use of the doctrine of Ideas see 
 Loofs, Dogmengeschichte* 352 S. 
 
THE IDEAL WORLD 319 
 
 Christian the start was in faith. Looking upon 
 the world about him he saw everywhere hints of 
 the ordering intelhgence of a spiritual Lord. 
 "For the invisible things of Him," as St. Paul 
 declares, "from the creation of the world are 
 clearly seen, being understood by the things that 
 are made, even His eternal power and Godhead.'"* 
 This intimation of God in nature, felt in all ages 
 by all men if their heart is not hardened, is faith, 
 obscure in its origin, uncertain in its inference, 
 but sufficient to awaken the soul to the desire of 
 truth. Then begins, or should begin, the self- 
 instruction of the soul in religion. By study of 
 the sacred Scripture, by attention to preaching, 
 above all by hearkening reverently to the voice 
 of revelation within the breast, faith is clarified 
 and confirmed and finally is converted into know- 
 ledge {gnosis) , which is one with love. The being 
 and character of God are no longer conjectured, 
 but are known. 
 
 Not unlike this in its early stages is the Pla- 
 tonic progress towards Ideas, as expounded in the 
 Phaedrus and the Symposium. At each chance 
 perception of ordered comeliness that meets us 
 in our way through the world, there stirs in the 
 soul a dim sense of power, a something whose 
 perfection is not of this earth*. But to the Pla- 
 tonist this first intimation of a superior order of 
 
 9 Romans i, 20. 
 
320 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 things comes not primarily, or perhaps one should 
 say not solely, as a revelation of God, but as what 
 seems to be an involuntary reminiscence from 
 some other time and some other state, when the 
 soul, unhampered by the body and in company 
 with celestial beings, beheld the pure realities of 
 beauty and virtue. Those realities are the Ideas, 
 and that other region beyond our time and space 
 is the Ideal world, which, since it is not of our 
 imagining nor yet is the actuality of our present 
 life, can be only a possession of memory. The 
 reminiscence of Ideas to the Platonist thus cor- 
 responds to the Christian's rudimentary faith in 
 God. 
 
 For most men this memory is an uncertain visi- 
 tation, a gleam that breaks suddenly through 
 their sense of the solid material world from some 
 sphere beyond their guess, and as suddenly van- 
 ishes away. However it may have been in an- 
 cient times, for us, with our romantic bias, the 
 recurrence of the vision is likely to be associated 
 oftenest with the spectacle of nature's still and 
 untroubled face — intimations that come to us un- 
 bidden and uncontrolled, in seasons of quiet con- 
 templation by lake or shadowed mountain slope, 
 or where the sea is breaking everlastingly upon 
 its shore. 
 
 There is no taking of the kingdom of Ideas by 
 
THE IDEAL WORLD 321 
 
 violence;" yet the business of philosophy and re- 
 ligion would be to extend these momentary 
 gleams into a continuous light, so that even now, 
 so far as may be, the Ideal world shall become the 
 luminous reality in which our life is passed. And 
 not by dreaming at ease but by taking of pains 
 must that illumination be reached, if it be reached 
 at all. He who would start out on the path 
 should first of all disabuse his mind of a senti- 
 mental misapprehension of Platonism which has 
 prevailed since the seventeenth century. The er- 
 ror, innocent in appearance but fraught with mis- 
 chievous consequences, found its most exquisite 
 expression in The Retreat of Henry Vaughan: 
 
 "Happy those early dayes ! when I 
 Shin'd in my Angell-infancy. 
 Before I understood this place 
 Appointed for my second race. 
 Or taught my soul to fancy ought 
 But a white, celestiall thought. 
 
 When on some gilded Cloud, or flowre 
 My gazing soul would dwell an houre. 
 And in those weaker glories spy 
 
 10 Synesius, De Providentia ii, 8: 'O? cKcTvts, oo-tis iv rrj xu>pa 
 vtpifievci TO. SeiKvvfieva Kad' €Ka(TTOv iv rdici irpoKimrovTa tou 
 7rapa7r€Ta<r/xaTos. €i Se Tis eis rrjv (TK-qvrjv <i<T)8io^oito, koI, to Xcyo- 
 fxivov, €15 TovTO Kwo<f)6aXfiC^oiTo, Sia Tov TTpoaKrjviov Tr]v napa- 
 (TKtvrjv aOpoav airacrav iiidv C7roxTev<rai, iirl tovtov 'EXXavoSiKai 
 Tov« /io(rTiyo<^o/30vs oTrXifovo-t. — ^The TrpoKVTTTovra of Synesius 
 are not precisely the Ideas, but the simile is apt. 
 
THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 Some shadows of eternity; 
 
 Before I taught my tongue to wound 
 
 My Conscience with a sinfull sound, 
 
 Or had the black art to dispence 
 
 A sev'rall sinne to ev'ry sence, 
 
 But felt through all this fleshly dresse 
 
 Bright shootes of everlastingnesse."^^ 
 
 To Plato this would be a half-truth. For him 
 also the soul comes to its birth with intimations 
 of immortality, but these are obscured by its 
 secular dalliance with pleasure and are further 
 darkened at the outset of this earthly existence 
 by contact with the flesh; it is the task of a life- 
 time, or of many lives, ending only with the con- 
 summation of wisdom, to convert such intima- 
 tions into knowledge. Not the child but the man 
 of tried experience is the true philosopher. The 
 way of confirmation is by a double effort which 
 may be defined best as attention, or study, and 
 purification. 
 
 The veil, Plato would say, which hangs be- 
 tween us and the vision of Ideas is let down by 
 forgetfulness and sloth.^^ Hence the first duty 
 
 11 The same thought will be found in Earle's Character of a 
 Child, and is reiterated in Traherne's Meditations. To the modern 
 reader it is familiar from Wordsworth's Intimations. The last 
 line quoted from Vaughan was borrowed from one of Feltham's 
 Resolves (No. Ixiv) : "The Conscience, the Character of a Ood 
 stampt in it [the soul], doe all prove it a shoot of everlasting- 
 nesse." 
 
 12 See Politicus 273c and Phaedo 99b. 
 
THE IDEAL WORLD 323 
 
 of the soul, when it hears the call, is to arouse it- 
 self from its lethal state of indolence, and to gird 
 itself as for a journey. The philosopher, as a 
 lover of wisdom, must be a lover of toil also; the 
 path through this Meadow of Calamity and be- 
 yond to the serene heights of memory, like the 
 fabled road to virtue, is long and uphill, and he 
 that undertakes to climb to the summit must be 
 ready, as it is quaintly said, with no lame or one- 
 legged industry/^ The mind must be trained as 
 w^ell as the body, and what that training embraces 
 any one knows who has followed Plato's theory 
 of education. All branches of learning are laid 
 under contribution. First the eyes are taught to 
 trace the laws working in nature, so as to be able 
 to comprehend the Ideal pattern on which it is 
 constructed. Particularly the orbits of the stars 
 will be as a writing in which the learner can read 
 the lessons of philosophy, and, reading, bring 
 back the motions of his soul to their pristine regu- 
 larity. And always there is this difference be- 
 tween the man who contemplates the world as a 
 theatre of religion and the scientist only, that for 
 the former as the order of phenomena grows 
 clearer their reality seems to fade away, while 
 more and more they appear as puppets of the in- 
 visible Powers that move them hither and thither. 
 
 ^3 Republic 535d: Upwrov fxev, cTttov, <f>i\o7rovLa ov )((oX6v Sti 
 eTvat Tov a.\l/dfX€vov (<^tA.O(ro<^tas) . 
 
 Republic 
 47Sb flf. 
 
324 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 It was in the spirit of Plato's Timaeus that a 
 later astronomer, Claudius Ptolemaeus, com- 
 posed his noble epigram : 
 
 "I know that I am mortal and ephemeral; but 
 when I scan the multitudinous circling spirals of 
 the stars, no longer do I touch earth with my feet, 
 but sit with Zeus himself, and take my fill of the 
 ambrosial food of gods."" 
 
 But these studies, astronomy and the like, 
 stand only at the threshold of wisdom, and the 
 true science comes with attention to the motions 
 of justice and honour and all the choir of virtues, 
 and all their opposites, in the human soul. These 
 the philosopher will study in the larger outline of 
 history, as they affect the destiny of States, and 
 then in their influence upon the lives of individual 
 men. And always, as a lover of sight (for phi- 
 losophy is essentially a desire to see) , he will 
 strain his inner eye in the darkness, until these 
 powers take form and grow radiant and shine out 
 in his spiritual heaven like the stars of the firma- 
 ment." 
 
 Attention and study are the dialectic of the 
 soul by which it rouses itself from its indolent 
 slumber in the senses, from its rhathymia, and 
 
 14 J. W. Mackail, Select Epigrams from the Oreek Anthology 
 iv, 32. Compare Timaeus 47a. The Christians also had much to 
 say about the ovpdvia ypdjxfiaTa, as Origen calls them in an 
 eloquent passage (Philocalia xxiii, 20). 
 
 15 See Appendix C. 
 
THE IDEAL WORLD 325 
 
 converts the transient dream of Ideas into the 
 "sober certainty of waking bliss." Purification 
 is in reahty the same activity, but regarded ethic- 
 ally rather than intellectually ; it is the endeavour 
 of the soul to shake from itself the dragging mass 
 of evil, and to realize what the Christian meant 
 when he repeated the Beatitude, "The pure in 
 heart shall see God." Much was made of this 
 aspect of Platonism in after times, and the com- 
 mentators developed elaborate rules for the life 
 of katharsis as a state of mediation between the 
 worldly life, with its "pohtical" virtues, and the 
 life of pure contemplation. From them it was 
 taken up by the so-called Cambridge Platonists 
 of the seventeenth century, who sought so to re- 
 fine the body by clean and spare living as to ren- 
 der it a fit vehicle for a soul intent upon "joying," 
 here and now, "as it were the joy of the soul of the 
 universe (gaudere gaudium animae universi)^ 
 Dr. Henry More knew well, and said, that he 
 was repeating the lessons learned from Platonic 
 writers when he described the effects of a Chris- 
 tian purification : 
 
 "There is a holy Art of Life, or certain sacred 
 Method of attaining unto great and Experimen- 
 tal Praegustations of the Highest Happiness, 
 that our Nature is capable of . . . . The Degrees 
 of Happiness and Perfection in the Soul arise, 
 or ascend, according to the Degree of Purity and 
 
326 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 Perfection in that Body or Matter she is united 
 with: So that we are to endeavour a Regress 
 from the baser Affections of the Earthly Body; 
 to make our Blood and Spirits of a more refined 
 Consistency; and to replenish our Inward Man 
 with so much larger Draughts of Aetherial or 
 Coelestial Matter. ... In the deep and calm 
 Mind alone, in a Temper clear and serene, 
 such as is purg'd from the Dregs, and devoid of 
 the more disorderly Tumults of the Body, doth 
 true Wisdom, or genuine Philosophy, as in its 
 own proper Tower, securely reside."^® 
 
 These later writers, no doubt, added a note 
 that jars somewhat with the harmonies they bor- 
 rowed from the Academy, and this is particularly 
 true when they soar into rhapsodies over the 
 mystical union with God. But Plato knew the 
 meaning of "the cleanness of sweet abstinence," 
 as well as any Christian seer; and at times his 
 language takes on the colours of enthusiasm, 
 notably in the central passages of the Phaedo, 
 where Socrates, speaking with the shadow of 
 death upon him, denounces "the pleasures, joys, 
 and triumphs of this present life," as leaden 
 weights that hamper the soul in its upward flight. 
 
 The philosophy of purification is in fact only 
 another name for the religious flight from the 
 world. It is not to be confused with a sullen dis- 
 
 16 Richard Ward, Life of Dr. Henry More, pp. 84, 12, 39, 212, 
 71. 
 
THE IDEAL WORLD 327 
 
 content, nor does it spring from a mere discom- 
 fort in the circumstances of life; the divine dis- 
 content is of another sort. Clement was true to 
 the Platonic tradition when he declared that "the 
 aversion for things of the senses would not bring 
 as a consequence the feeling of kinship with in- 
 telligible Ideas, but on the contrary by this feel- 
 ing of kinship the whole being of the lover of 
 knowledge suffers a natural revolution away 
 from things of the senses."^^ Yet, if this revolu- 
 tion of faith has its root in a positive longing of 
 memory,^^ and is a voluntary turning to the light, 
 its first effect is felt rather as a darkening of 
 what before stood out in sharp relief. What was 
 far becomes clear, and over what was near to the 
 senses a veil is drawn, as in a cool night of spring 
 one sees a mist thicken over the low-lying valley 
 of a stream, while the moon rides above in cloud- 
 less splendour, "and the immeasurable heavens 
 break open to their highest." Thus it is with the 
 soul's change of attention ; the very globe of this 
 earth, which had seemed so solid and so real, 
 melts into the insubstantial fabric of a dream, 
 and the men move about on it as shadows, and 
 this our life, which had so vexed us with its fierce 
 
 ^T Stromata IV, xxiii, 148: Oi8c fxrjv ^ rCiv al(T6r}T(x)v a7roaTpo<f>r] 
 Trjv irpoi TO. vorjTa oiKCtuoriv aKoXov6w<: iroiotrj dv, e/MTraXiv Se i) 
 Trpos Toi VOT/Ta oiKtiwcTis Kara (ftvaiv irepuiywyr] toJ yvwariKw dirb 
 t!x)v alaOrjTwv yivtrat. 
 
 ^^ Phaedrus 250c: HoOat twv totc. 
 
328 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 pains and pleasures, fades to an illusion most vain 
 and fugitive in the bosom of the infinite illusion — 
 une illusion des plus fugitives au sein de rUluMon 
 infinie.^^ 
 
 Illusion: that is the word, the illusion of the 
 world and the disillusion of the soul. Few men 
 perhaps are capable of a vivid or continuous 
 realization of the world of Ideas; that is some- 
 thing to wait for and to strive towards. But he 
 who does not know by experience the meaning 
 of the word illusion, may as well close the books 
 of religion and the works of the true poets, as, 
 indeed, the secular and narrowly scientific habit 
 of mind today is fast closing them. From Pin- 
 dar's "dream of a shadow," from Shakespeare's 
 "we are such stuff as dreams are made on, and 
 our little life is rounded with a sleep," to Ten- 
 nyson's "watching from a phantom shore . . . the 
 phantom walls of this illusion fade" — always this 
 thought of the unreality of appearances has hov- 
 ered behind the poetic vision of beauty, and has 
 become most insistent just when the perception of 
 physical loveliness is keenest. The poets speak 
 the language of religion, one might say, against 
 their will; but with the great orators of the 
 Church illusion is the conscious burden of their 
 
 19 Sainte-Beuve's ejaculation at the conclusion of his long labour 
 over Port-Royal. The master knew well, too well, this half of 
 the truth. For the distinction between the true and the false 
 illusion I may refer to Shelburne Essays I, 122. 
 
THE IDEAL WORLD 329 
 
 doctrine. So, to take a single example, when 
 Eiitropius, master of the court at Constantinople, 
 fell from power and sought refuge from the Em- 
 peror's rage under the altar of the church he had 
 persecuted, Chrysostom, preaching to the people 
 with the body of the wretch cowering before them, 
 drew this moral from the transitoriness of human 
 grandeur : 
 
 " 'Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.' These are 
 the words that should be written up on the walls 
 of your houses, and on your very raiment, and 
 in the market place and the home and in the 
 streets, on your doors and entrances, and before 
 all in the conscience of each man, forever in view, 
 for meditation and guidance at all times. Be- 
 cause the illusion of the world, and its masks and 
 acting, seem to many to be the truth, therefore 
 I say that these ought to be the words of each 
 man to his neighbour daily at meals and when 
 two or three meet together, and so he should hear 
 from his neighbour — 'vanity of vanities, all is 
 vanity.' "'' 
 
 Life, the poets would hint and the preachers 
 have vigorously affirmed, is inevitably a choice 
 
 20 Charity for the fallen persecutor, courage to fac« the Em- 
 peror's vengeful wrath, humility in the heart that has seen the 
 instability of life, are the lessons enforced by St. Chrysostom in 
 what must have been about the most impressive sermon ever 
 preached in a Christian pulpit. The sense of earthly illusion was 
 often in Chrysostom's mind, as may be seen, e.g., In Mat. 789b 
 and In Eph. 97c. 
 
330 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 between two interests, or sets of values, one of 
 which must fade into unreahty as the other grows 
 more real. It is one of the constant thoughts of 
 Plato that the ordinary man is not really awake, 
 but is walking about, like a somnambulist, in pur- 
 suit of illusory phantoms. If the dream is mis- 
 taken for the reality, as with most of us it hap- 
 pens, that is because the passions obscure our 
 Republic S86c sense of values. "The pleasures that men know 
 are mixed with pains — how can they be other- 
 wise? For they are mere shadows and painted 
 pictures of the true pleasure, and are coloured 
 by contrast, which exaggerates both the light and 
 the shade, and so implant in the careless mind 
 insane desires of themselves ; and they are fought 
 about, as Stesichorus says the Greeks fought 
 about the shadow of Helen at Troy, in ignorance 
 of the true Helen." Against this witchcraft of 
 the passions the sentence of philosophy, that only 
 Ideas are real, must be repeated by the soul to 
 itself as a charm (epoide) , until the shadows pass 
 with the night, and the sun has arisen, and we see 
 no longer in signs and symbols, enigmatically, but 
 face to face, as the gods see and know. 
 
 Meanwhile what will be the manner of life of 
 one to whom not only the palpable objects of 
 nature but his own feelings of pleasure and pain 
 and the like feelings of all men are a web of il- 
 lusion? How shall he live, as hve he must, who 
 
THE IDEAL WORLD 331 
 
 has attained the intuition of reUgion? "How 
 can he whose mind is filled with the majesty of Republic 486a 
 philosophy and revels in the vision of all time 
 and all being, how can such an one think much 
 of human Hfe?" It is clear enough what those 
 who walk about in the shadows of time, and to 
 whom only that is real which they can grasp with 
 their hands and see with their eyes and relish with 
 their senses, will make of him. "He who hasphaedrus 249c 
 broken away from what men commonly take 
 seriously and is engaged with the divine, is ral- 
 lied by the mass of mankind as mad, since they 
 understand not that he is inspired." Shall he 
 not seem demented to those in the dust and heat 
 of the fight at Troy, if he tells them that the 
 Helen for whom they are clashing their spears 
 is only a deceptive image, an eidolon, while the 
 true Helen is not there at all, but safe far away in 
 Egypt?— 
 
 "Me Hermes caught away in folds of air, 
 And veiled in cloud, — for Zeus forgat me not, — 
 And in these halls of Proteus set me down. 
 Of all men holding him most continent. 
 That I might keep me pure for Menelaus."^^ 
 
 What the ranks of men think of the philosopher, 
 in this sense, we know well enough, as Socrates 
 and Plato knew in their day. But how is it with 
 himself? Persuaded that life is a play and not 
 
 21 Euripides, Helen '44-48, Way's translation. 
 
332 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 the reality, will he withdraw into a contemptuous 
 isolation and refuse to enact a part? Must disillu- 
 sion be synonymous with indifference? Plato 
 has answered this question in what is the ripest 
 outcome of his long experience and the last max- 
 im of his school: "The business of mankind is 
 not worthy of great seriousness, yet there is a 
 necessity upon us to be serious, and this is our 
 misfortune."" 
 
 22 Laws 803b : *E(rTi hr) Toivvv ra twi/ dv$p<i)7r<iiv TrpdyfiaTa fii- 
 ydkr)'; ju-cv crirovBrji ovk d^ta, dvayKoiov ye firjv a-TrovBd^tiv' tovto 
 8k OVK cvTux«- "^he context is full of meaning. Com- 
 pare also, besides the passages already quoted, Laws 709a, 
 Phaedrus 277e, Republic 500b, 517c, 604b. With these parallels 
 before us, it is bewildering to meet a critic (Bruns, Plato's Ge- 
 setze) who rejects the passage in the Laws as an un-Platonic 
 interpolation of Philippus. There is an interesting comment on 
 the passage in Caird's Evolution of Theology (I, 159). He quotes 
 as follows from Krohn's Der Platonische Staat: "Here we find 
 a great rift in Platonism. It was as the moralizing follower of 
 Socrates that Plato drew the first sketch of the ideal State, but 
 it is as the metaphysician— who looks beyond the changing ap- 
 pearance to the real being of things— that he completes it. These 
 two tendencies meet in conflict, yet neither can free itself from 
 the other. The reformer, who would heal the disease of his 
 people, must believe in the usefulness of his own art; but the 
 speculative thinker must contemn the fleeting forms of life in 
 view of the substantial reality that imderlies them. This rift in 
 Platonism is, however, the rift that rends the life of all noble 
 spirits. They work in the present with their best energy, yet 
 they know that the present is but a fleeting shadow." That is 
 interesting; but I hardly think that "rift" is the right word, nor 
 do I believe that Plato's spirit was exactly "rent," at least in 
 his hours of insight, by what he calls, no doubt, the misfortune 
 
THE IDEAL WORLD 888 
 
 That is a hard saying, hard to obey and still 
 harder to interpret, but it cannot be neglected 
 by any one who would understand the practical 
 law of the religious Hfe. It contains in germ 
 what was afterwards expressed for the Christian 
 by the single word apathy (apatheia) ," and with 
 this development of the doctrine in mind we may 
 perhaps get some inkling of Plato's meaning. 
 Now apathy, as the word implies, is freedom from 
 the passions (pathe) . The passions are those im- 
 pulses of the mind towards something desired or 
 away from something imdesired, which run to 
 excess and surpass the right measure of reason.^* 
 They are the feelings forced upon the soul against 
 its will or admitted by its indolent acquiescence." 
 They are those motions of love and hatred, 
 pleasure and pain, which trouble mankind by 
 
 of our state. Newman, I take it, came nearer to the true para- 
 dox of the spiritual life as Plato felt it, in such sermons as that 
 entitled The Greatness and Littleness of Human Life, on which 
 Wilfrid Ward has commented worthily in his Last Lectures (p. 
 138). 
 
 23 Apathy was the catchword of the Stoics also, from whom, 
 more immediately, it was taken over into Christianity. But the 
 meaning of the word as it is employed by Christians is far closer 
 to the philosophy of Plato than to that of Chrysippus or Epic- 
 tetus. 
 
 24 Clement, Stromata II, xiii, 59. 
 
 25 Ibid II, XX, 110: 'O /xev ow dirXoi)? Xoyo? t^5 Kad' rjfia.^ 
 <l>i\o<ro<f>ia<i ra nddr) irdvTa ivair€p€iafj.aTa Trj<; yj/v^rjs <f>r]ai etvai 
 T^S fjja\6aK7J<i Kal dKovarj<; Koi olov ivairo<r<j>payicrixaTa twv ttvcv- 
 /xariKtuv Svydfitdiv, tt/ooS a? 17 irdXrj -^filv. 
 
THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 false presentments of reality. More than that: 
 they are the failures of the soul to resist a nat- 
 ural inclination towards things ephemeral and 
 imperfect, even though in themselves innocent, 
 and to raise itself to the contemplation of what is 
 eternal and divine. The feelings and emotions 
 in themselves are not passions, but become pas- 
 sions when they are allowed to break into and 
 overrun what should be the inviolable stronghold 
 of our being. 
 
 So much is clear, that apatheia is not at all the 
 "apathy" denoted by its English equivalent. 
 There is nothing of sluggishness, or mean indif- 
 ference, or brutish insensibility, in the content of 
 the Greek word as developed by Christianity 
 from the Platonic philosophy. Apathy, so un- 
 derstood, in its perfection is the attribute of God, 
 who, forever abiding in His own character,^^ took 
 upon Himself the ordering of this world of 
 passion and change. And that man is likest God 
 who, by learning to know himself, has learned to 
 live his own life while bearing the common burden 
 of humanity.'' "In this way," says Chrysostom, 
 
 28 Timaens 42e : 'Ev tw eavToii Kara Tftoirov ^6€L. However 
 Plato may distinguish here between God and the lesser gods, and 
 however he may speak in the Politicus (272e) of God's with- 
 drawal temporarily from the helm of the world, he never meant 
 to deny the reality and continual eflBcacy of Providence. 
 
 27 rvuj^i aeavrov, to to. eavTOv TrpaTTCiv, KOiva ra twv </>iXwv, 
 the triple thread that runs through The Republic. 
 
THE IDEAL WORLD 335 
 
 "man becomes like to God, when he suffers noth- 
 ing from those who would do him wrong, feeling 
 no insult when insulted, or blows when beaten, or 
 ridicule when ridiculed."^^ More than that: we 
 are saved by a profounder law of apathy, "being 
 saved by the passions of the passionless Christ."^^ 
 So perhaps we may understand the hard say- 
 ing of Plato. Into the midst of the seductions 
 of indolence and ignorance comes the terrible 
 word of philosophy, that in all the business of 
 mankind there is nothing to be taken seriously, 
 yet we as men must be serious. Somehow we 
 must be engaged in a battle whose issues are not 
 ours, partners in a play whose prizes we con- 
 temn, in the world yet not of it, moved by sym- 
 pathies which yet leave some part of the soul un- 
 moved. He who has learned this secret is, as Plato 
 saj^s, autarkes, sufficient unto himself whether 
 fortune smile or frown, and a citizen of the State 
 though his privacy remains untouched. Like 
 Hamlet's friend he "is not passion's slave," but 
 bears himself "as one, in suffering all, that suffers 
 nothing." This is a paradox which definitions 
 will not define; but in the Apology and Crito and 
 Phaedo it has been clothed by Plato in flesh and 
 blood. In the imperturbable calm and the hu- 
 
 28 /n Rom. 453a. 
 
 29 Gregory Nazianzen, Or. Theol. iv, 5: IlpO(7€tX.r]fi/i€voi Kal 
 treatofTfifvoi rots tov airadov^ Trd6t(nv. 
 
336 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 manity of Socrates we may see the most finished 
 model of the apathetic man as conceived by phi- 
 losophy. 
 
 No doubt, as we know this human Mfe, what 
 wisdom can bestow must be taken largely as a 
 liberation of hope, and it is our misfortune that 
 religion implies a voluntary, or, if not voluntary, 
 then an enforced lingering in the shadows of the 
 cave. Such is the mysterious law of our exist- 
 ence. But even now there is something more than 
 this, and apathy may be consistent with an inner 
 peace of spirit very near to the purest elation. 
 And this follows because, as a man frees himself 
 from the servitude of pleasure and its associate 
 pain, and makes himself master of his soul, an- 
 other range of feeling opens within him, reaching 
 upwards to a happiness of which pleasure is only 
 a clumsy simulacrum. Everywhere, with endless 
 reiteration, Plato upholds happiness (eudcdmo- 
 nia) as the end of religion and the immediate 
 possession of philosophy; and he takes pains, in 
 the Philehus, to reject the state of pure know- 
 ledge without feehng or personal consciousness, 
 were such a state conceivable, as the summum 
 bonum. Philosophy is something more than a 
 cold and benumbing relief from the disappoint- 
 ments and tragic inadequacies that are the in- 
 evitable portion of a life transitory itself in a 
 world of ceaseless transition. It is not a little 
 
THE IDEAL WORLD 337 
 
 thing, when what the heart desired falls away, 
 and what was unloved endures, and all our 
 boasted skill brings forth the fruits of folly, to 
 hear that our troubles are but "the fierce vexation 
 of a dream." It is much, through these clouds 
 that change in a moment from fair to ugly and 
 from ugly to fair, to have caught glimpses, 
 though it be darkly and in symbols, of a justice 
 and a beauty and a goodness which are fixed be- 
 yond the turnings of mutability. And after 
 many Hves, or few, some time, if we persist in 
 the right path and refuse to take the shadows for 
 substance, we shall come where all the riddles are 
 read, and what we have guessed we shall know, 
 and what we have believed we shall see. Then 
 indeed we shall be like the gods, and shall live 
 with them, and with the spirits of just men made 
 perfect, a full life in the contemplation and en- 
 joyment of everlasting realities. 
 
 Plotinus, as I have insisted and shall have to 
 insist again, lost sight of the true divinity of 
 Plato when he set up an all-engulfing abstract 
 Unity in place of a personal God and Ideas; but 
 there is the ring of right Platonism, though the 
 overtones may be borrowed from Christianity, in 
 the oracle given to a friend, after Plotinus' death, 
 who inquired where his soul might be. I quote 
 the exquisite translation of F. W. M. Myers : 
 
338 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 "Pure spirit — once a man — pure spirits now 
 Greet thee rejoicing, and of these art thou; 
 Not vainly was thy whole soul alway bent 
 With one same battle and one the same intent 
 Through eddying cloud and earth's bewildering roar 
 To win her bright way to that stainless shore. 
 Ay, 'mid the salt spume of this troublous sea, 
 This death in life, this sick perplexity. 
 Oft on thy struggle through the obscure unrest 
 A revelation opened from the Blest — 
 Showed close at hand the goal thy hope would win, 
 Heaven's kingdom round thee and thy God within. 
 So sure a help the eternal Guardians gave, 
 From life's confusion so were strong to save, 
 Upheld thy wandering steps that sought the day 
 And set them steadfast on the heavenly way. 
 Nor quite even here on thy broad brows was shed 
 The sleep which shrouds the living, who are dead ; 
 Once by God's grace was from thine eyes unfurled 
 This veil that screens the immense and whirling 
 
 world. 
 Once, while the spheres around thee in music ran. 
 Was very Beauty manifest to man; — 
 Ah, once to have seen her, once to have known her 
 
 there. 
 For speech too sweet, for earth too heavenly fair! 
 But now the tomb where long thy soul had lain 
 Bursts, and thy tabernacle is rent in twain; 
 Now from about thee, in thy new home above. 
 Has perished all but life, and all but love, — 
 And on all lives and on all loves outpoured 
 
THE IDEAL WORLD 339 
 
 Free grace and full, a Spirit from the Lord, 
 High in that heaven whose windless vaults enfold 
 Just men made perfect, and an age all gold. 
 Thine own Pythagoras is with thee there, 
 And sacred Plato in the sacred air, 
 And whoso followed, and all high hearts that knew 
 In death's despite what deathless Love can do. 
 To God's right hand they have scaled the starry 
 
 way — 
 Pure spirits these, thy spirit pure as they. 
 Ah saint! how many and many an anguish past, 
 To how fair haven art thou come at last! 
 On thy meek head what Powers their blessing pour. 
 Filled full with light, and rich for evermore!" 
 
 So far as we know, this was the last regular 
 utterance of the oracular god whom Socrates had 
 served and who had pronounced him the wisest 
 of men. Apollo's words will convey to some the 
 simple hope of a childlike superstition, to others 
 the enigma of hardly attained truth. "Such I 
 know the god to be," said Sophocles in one of 
 his lost dramas, "to the wise ever a riddler of 
 oracles, to the unreasoning a teacher of lessons 
 lightly learned and lightly held." 
 
 THE END 
 
APPENDIX A 
 
 Certain critics of my Platonism have objected to this 
 distinction between "philosophy" and "metaphysics." 
 So far as the question is confined to linguistic usage 
 they may be right, for all metaphysicians would lay 
 claim to the title of philosophers. But the observance 
 of a radical difference between what I mean by philoso- 
 phy and by metaphysics, despite the fact that there may 
 be, as in all such differentiations, a middle point at 
 which they seem to merge together, I hold to be a prime 
 requisite for clear thinking. And I do not know of any 
 better words to denote this difference. The boundary 
 between one and the other is passed when the reasoner 
 is no longer satisfied to accept the data of human 
 experience as these come to us in their paradoxical form, 
 but presumes to rationalize the ultimate how and where- 
 fore of things. Thus, Huxley was indulging in vain 
 metaphysics when, admitting one set of facts and, in the 
 name of reason, rejecting another set of facts, he re- 
 duced the world to an absolute mechanism. And the 
 Bergsonians are equally metaphysical when, by a pro- 
 cess of selection and rejection exactly contrary to 
 Huxley's, they expound their theory of absolute spon- 
 taneity. As Luther, the sturdiest opponent of Aristo- 
 telian and medieval metaphysics, well said: "Cur" et 
 "quomodo^' exitiales voculae. It would need another 
 Luther to cleanse the modern college halls of miscalled 
 
 340 
 
APPENDIX A 341 
 
 philosophy. Meanwhile some notion of the distinction 
 between philosophy and metaphysics, and some notion 
 also of the utterly wrong deductions to be drawn from 
 the distinction, may be gained from a glance at Prof. 
 John Dewey's recent book on Reconstruction in Phi- 
 losophy (New York, 1920). 
 
 Now Mr. Dewey is a moralist, but he is a modernist 
 also, and as such is obliged to show that wisdom was 
 born yesterday. "Ethical theory ever since [its begin- 
 ning in Greece] has been singularly hypnotized by the 
 notion that its business is to discover some final end or 
 good or some ultimate and supreme law. This is the 
 common element among the diversity of theories." And 
 this common element, in Mr. Dewey's eyes, is more per- 
 nicious than the diversity; for it has been nothing but 
 an attempt to justify and support the success of the 
 predaceous by sanctifying custom in the name of ab- 
 stract law and right. Hence he runs amuck through 
 the history of philosophy ; there shall be no summum 
 bonitm, no telos, no abstract principle for him, and woe 
 to the upholders of such. 
 
 In one respect a Platonist will be with Mr. Dewey. 
 In his onslaught upon the quibbling that goes on in the 
 name of philosophy, the "vain metaphysics and idle epis- 
 temology" that waste the breath of teachers and be- 
 fuddle the brains of students, he is doing good and 
 valiant service. William James pointed the way when 
 he declared that our first task was to "short-circuit" 
 the whole business of German metaphysics since Kant. 
 But Mr. Dewey is mistaken in his supposition that 
 such a distinction between a genuine philosophy and a 
 
342 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 verbal metaphysic began with modern pragmatism or, 
 by a gracious inclusion, with Bacon. And he is a little 
 presumptuous, to say the least, when he assumes that 
 all the idealistic philosophy of the world has been a 
 grovelling effort to shirk the present living actualities. 
 "To Plato," he says, "experience meant enslavement to 
 the past, to custom." All his striving "was the activity 
 of an army forever marking time and never going any- 
 where" ; all his fine words mere buzzing in a metaphysical 
 vacuum. A better knowledge of history and a modicum 
 of modesty would have taught Mr. Dewey that Plato, 
 the typical idealist and the greatest of the school, was 
 as bitterly antagonistic to "vain metaphysics and idle 
 epistemology" — eristic he called them — as is any "up- 
 to-date" pragmatist or "new realist" ; he was in a sense 
 the first of all pragmatists. He too insisted, as does Mr. 
 Dewey, in season and out of season on the need of keep- 
 ing close to experience and of testing all apparent truths 
 by their results ; only he thought that the highest and 
 most significant and most veracious experience was of 
 a kind which Mr. Dewey refuses to recognize. He be- 
 lieved that it was the office of philosophy to discipline 
 the character, to adjust the perception of values, to 
 open the inner eye upon what was actually going on 
 in the soul, to lift this troubled and interrupted life 
 here and now, so far as might be, into a sphere of larger 
 and more permanent and more joyous activities. All 
 of which to Mr. Dewey is merely marking time and go- 
 ing nowhere. 
 
 And Mr. Dewey is equally mistaken in supposing 
 that in tearing down the standard of historic idealism 
 
APPENDIX A 348 
 
 he is not himself bowing down to another standard in 
 its place. Every situation, he says, shall be judged in 
 and for itself without reference to any standard. "Con- 
 firmation, corroboration, verification, lie in works, con- 
 sequences. Handsome is that handsome does. . . . There 
 are conflicting desires and alternative goods. What is 
 needed is to find the right course of action, the right 
 good." Excellently well said; but will Mr. Dewey tell 
 us what he means by handsome? Will he tell us how 
 any man is to decide which is the right course of action 
 and the right good unless he has some standard by 
 which he tests and measures what is right? Beat about 
 the bush as one will, that test and measure of Tightness 
 is one's "final end." And indeed Mr. Dewey has his 
 standard as absolute and rigid as that set up by any of 
 his detested predecessors, only it is a different stan- 
 dard from that which has been most honoured in the 
 past, and he is trying to throw dust in our eyes by de- 
 nouncing all absolutes together. He is one of those to 
 whom, as Plato expressed it, nothing is true which can- 
 not be weighed in the hands and grasped by the teeth. 
 The only solid facts are those which come to the car- 
 penter and the smith and the plowman at their daily 
 tasks, and in such facts is the foundation of all science. 
 The world's long tradition of spiritual emotions and 
 conquests, theology's peace of God and philosophy's 
 comfort of things unseen, — these are miserable illusions. 
 All the professions of saint and sage to clarify and 
 confirm these experiences have been the lying words of 
 men who sought to escape responsibility and to find 
 excuses for the greed of tyrants and the suffocating 
 
344 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 oppression of institutions. It is pretty clear that the 
 modern pragmatic distinction between philosophy and 
 metaphysics is not the distinction which belongs to the 
 Greek Tradition. 
 
APPENDIX B 
 
 Plato's final argument for the immortality of the 
 soul and for the being of God is pragmatic,^ but his 
 pragmatism is of an order different in kind from the 
 als-ob ("as-if") variety deduced from the Kantian meta- 
 physics. This distinction I hold to be of supreme im- 
 portance. The als-ob pragmatism itself is so well stated, 
 and, as I think, so wrongly identified with the Platonic 
 pragmatism, by Prof. J. A. Stewart in the Introduction 
 to his Myths of Plato, that I take the liberty of quoting 
 a page or two therefrom : 
 
 "The Categories of the Understanding [e.g. sub- 
 stance, causation] are so many conditions of thought 
 which Human Understanding, constituted as it is, ex- 
 pects to find, and does find, fully satisfied in the details 
 of sensible experience. The Ideas of Reason [the im- 
 mortal soul, an intelligible cosmos, God] indicate the 
 presence of a condition of thought which is not satis- 
 fied in any particular item of experience. They are 
 aspirations or ideals expressing that nisus after fuller 
 and fuDer comprehension of conditions, wider and wider 
 correspondence with environment — in short, that nisus 
 after Life, and faith in it as good, without which man 
 would not will to pursue the experience rendered pos- 
 sible in detail by the Categories. But although there 
 
 1 For another aspect of the Platonic pragmatism I commend 
 to the reader's notice Charles P. Parker's contribution, at once 
 amusing and profound, to Harvard Essays on Classical SubjecU. 
 
 345 
 
346 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 can be no speculative science of objects answering to 
 the Ideas of Reason, we should come to naught if we did 
 not act as if there were such objects; and any repre- 
 sentation of objects answering to these Ideas which does 
 not invite exposure by pretending to scientific rank is 
 valuable as helping us to 'act as if.' The objects of 
 these Ideas are objects, not for science, but for faith. 
 When the scientific understanding 'proves' that God 
 exists, or that the Soul is immortal, refutation lies near 
 at hand; but the 'as if of the moral agent rests on a 
 sure foundation. 
 
 "To return now from Kant to Plato: — Plato's Myths 
 induce and regulate Transcendental Feeling for the 
 service of conduct and knowledge by setting forth the 
 a priori conditions of conduct and knowledge — that is, 
 (1) by representing certain ideals or presuppositions 
 in concrete form — the presuppositions of an immortal 
 Soul, of an intelligible Cosmos, and of a wise and good 
 God — all three being natural expressions of the sweet 
 hope in the faith of which man lives and struggles on 
 and on; and (2) by tracing to their origin in the wis- 
 dom and goodness of God, and the constitution of the 
 Cosmos, certain habitudes or faculties (categories and 
 virtues), belonging to the make of man's intellectual and 
 moral nature, which prescribe the various modes in 
 which he must order in detail the life which his faith or 
 sweet hope impels him to maintain. Myth, not argu- 
 mentative conversation, is rightly chosen by Plato as 
 the vehicle of exposition when he deals with a priori 
 conditions of conduct and knowledge, whether they be 
 ideals or faculties. When a man asks himself, as he 
 
APPENDIX B 347 
 
 must, for the reason of the hope in which he struggles 
 on in the ways prescribed by his faculties, he is fain to 
 answer — 'Because I am an immortal Soul, created with 
 these faculties by a wise and good God, under whose 
 government I live in a Universe which is His finished 
 work.' This answer, according to Plato, as I read him, 
 is the natural and legitimate expression of the 'sweet 
 hope which guides the wayward thought of mortal 
 man' ; and the expression reacts on — gives strength and 
 steadiness to — that which it expresses. It is a 'true 
 answer' in the sense that man's life would come to 
 naught if he did not act and think as if it were true." 
 
 Now, with all due deference to so excellent a scholar 
 as Professor Stewart, is there not here a deplorable 
 confusion of two contrary methods of philosophizing? 
 Kant first proves that the existence of God cannot be 
 established by reason (so far Plato perhaps might con- 
 cur). He next leaves morality dependent upon the 
 existence of God as a regulative ideal; that is, our 
 morality depends on acting as if God existed (here 
 Plato would dissent violently). He then essays to lift 
 himself by his bootstraps, as the vulgar have it, ar- 
 guing that this as-if must be a fact because we act as 
 if it were a fact (here certainly Plato would detect a 
 fallacy). 
 
 The gist of the matter is in a sentence of Caird's 
 quoted by Professor Stewart: "Lastly, the Absolute 
 Being was to theoretic reason a mere ideal which 
 knowledge could not realize ; but now His existence is 
 certified to us as the necessary condition of the pos- 
 sibility of the object of a Will determined by the moral 
 
348 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 law. Thus, through practical reason we gain a con- 
 viction of the reality of objects corresponding to the 
 three Ideas of Pure Reason." This surely is to argue in 
 a circle, whereas Plato's argument proceeds in a straight 
 line. If the hypothesis of Republic ii means anything, 
 it must mean that the Ideas of God and the soul and 
 the cosmos are not the necessary condition of our 
 knowing and following the moral law, but that this law 
 is something which we discover by direct and imme- 
 diate experience. Plato then, book x, proceeds to the 
 belief in God and the immortal soul, not as a condition 
 of the moral facts, but as a corollary of those facts. It 
 is natural to assume that there is in the world at large 
 a power corresponding to the moral law we have dis- 
 covered in our personal experience, and that this power 
 is akin to the soul of man in whom the law works. This 
 probability is so strong that Plato accepts it as a truth 
 not reasonably to be questioned, as a truth, indeed, 
 which the human race has always accepted. It has 
 too a pragmatical warrant in the larger religious ex- 
 perience, which is something more than mere morality; 
 but, again, the law of morality is not conditioned upon 
 such a belief. 
 
 The als-ob philosophy in actual practice is suicidal. 
 The Idea of God is merely regulative; we cannot be 
 sure of the existence of God, but, in order to act in a 
 certain way, we must suppose that he exists. But, the 
 moment reason has dispelled the illusion of God's real 
 existence, a man will say: "Why must I act as if God 
 existed.?" So we reach precisely the position of Pro- 
 tagoras ("as to the gods we do not know whether they 
 
APPENDIX B 849 
 
 exist or not"), and make man the measure of all things 
 after the manner of the sophists against whom Socrates 
 and Plato spent their energy. As a matter of fact 
 the als-ob philosophy of Vaihinger and the immoralism 
 of Nietzsche are the twin offspring of the Kantian meta- 
 physics, just as the brutal cynicism of Callicles and 
 Thrasymachus was twin brother to the philosophy of 
 Protagoras. 
 
APPENDIX C 
 
 Cardinal Newman, in a famous passage (Idea of a 
 University 514), has described the coming and going 
 of the vision of Ideas in language exquisitely chosen to 
 blend the faith of a Christian with the philosophy of a 
 Platonist : 
 
 "The physical nature lies before us, patent to the 
 sight, ready to the touch, appealing to the senses in so 
 unequivocal a way that the science which is founded 
 upon it is as real to us as the fact of our personal 
 existence. But the phenomena, which are the basis of 
 morals and Religion, have nothing of this luminous evi- 
 dence. Instead of being obtruded upon our notice, so 
 that we cannot possibly overlook them, they are the 
 dictates either of Conscience or of Faith. They are 
 faint shadows and tracings, certain indeed, but delicate, 
 fragile, and almost evanescent, which the mind recog- 
 nizes at one time, not at another, — discerns when it is 
 calm, loses when it is in agitation. The reflection of 
 sky and mountains in the lake is a proof that sky and 
 mountains are around it, but the twilight, or the mist, 
 or the sudden storm hurries away the beautiful image, 
 which leaves behind it no memorial of what it was. 
 Something like this are the Moral Law and the in- 
 formations of Faith, as they present themselves to in- 
 dividual minds. Who can deny the existence of Con- 
 science? who does not feel the force of its injunctions.'' 
 but how dim is the illumination in which it is invested, 
 
 350 
 
APPENDIX C 851 
 
 and how feeble its influence, compared with that evi- 
 dence of sight and touch which is the foundation of 
 Physical Science! How easily can we be talked out of 
 our clearest views of duty ! how does this or that moral 
 precept crumble into nothing when we rudely handle it ! 
 how does the fear of sin pass off from us, as quickly as 
 the glow of modesty dies away from the countenance! 
 and then we say, 'It is all superstition.' However, after 
 a time we look round, and then to our surprise we see, 
 as before, the same law of duty, the same moral pre- 
 cepts, the same protests against sin, appearing over 
 against us, in their old places, as if they never had been 
 brushed away, like the divine handwriting upon the wall 
 at the banquet. Then perhaps we approach them 
 rudely, and inspect them irreverently, and accost them 
 sceptically, and away they go again, like so many 
 spectres, — shining in their cold beauty, but not pre- 
 senting themselves bodily to us, for our inspection, so 
 to say, of their hands and their feet. And thus these 
 awful, supernatural, bright, majestic, delicate appari- 
 tions, much as we may in our hearts acknowledge their 
 sovereignty, are no match as a foundation of Science 
 for the hard, palpable, material facts which make up 
 the province of Physics." 
 
 Dr. Sanday, following the track of William James, 
 has usurped the jargon of modern psychology for the 
 same notion : 
 
 "All these things are latent. The door of that 
 treasure-house, which is also a workshop, is locked, 
 so far as the conscious personality is concerned. For 
 there is no 'harrowing of hell,' no triumphant descent 
 
352 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
 
 into the nether world, followed by a release and return 
 of captives on any large scale. The door is locked 
 against any such violent irruption. And yet, in some 
 strange way, there seem to be open chinks and crevices 
 through which there is a constant coming and going, 
 denizens or manufactured products of the lower world 
 returning to the upper air of consciousness and once 
 more entering into the train and sequence of what we 
 call active life, though indeed the invisible processes of 
 this life are just as active as the visible." (Ancient and 
 Modern Christologies 143.) 
 
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